Bringing back memories I didn't have

[davidn]

As part of my education in 80s live-action Disney films that I missed growing up, we watched Cool Runnings, the film about the Jamaican bobsleigh team, yesterday. I had to have the subtitles turned on. Perhaps I was just overly tired.

I thought I'd never seen any of it before, but there was one scene that I suddenly realized that I'd seen a fragment of on TV when I was very young - the part where they're doing their first practice run with the high-pitched screaming (so much so that I had remembered it as a woman's voice) followed by the crash in the tunnel. Does anyone else get this, isolated memories of things like that that suddenly make sense when you recognize them years later? It happened to me when I first saw Goldfinger all the way through as well, with the vault door and the flippy-counter bomb - I had been in the living room when my dad and uncle were watching that when I was about four.

Comments

[kytheraen.livejournal.com]

Sanka, ya dead?

Ya man.

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

I sort of know what you mean... sometimes I'll see something I've seen before, and realise intellectually that it must be the same thing as a memory I have, but my memories and emotions will refuse to connect the two... if that makes any sense? I find it often happens with places, actually..

[davidn]

As in, places that you've been somewhere before when you were too young to have any specific memories of it, and yet there are things about it that you know you've seen before?

[e-to-the-ipi.livejournal.com]

At some point, I'm going to work out when it was I was in Crianlarich and why I know how to pronounce it.

That's been bothering me for a couple of years now.

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

Places that I've been, while I was too young to have any sense of where I was -- seeing it again makes me realise that "this must be the place in that weird early memory", but my brain refuses to believe me..

[kjorteo]

Memories of things that never happened
These are always the hardest to forget.

[wolfekko.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've had that several times with movies, books, or songs... Remembering a little piece of something from somewhere, but not knowing if I just imagined it, or where it was from, and then rediscovering it :-P

I always remember the part in that movie where the guy has to take a bathroom break, but they go on the practice run first, and at the end one of them goes "Okay mon, now you can pee." And his response: "Oh... Too late."

Or when one of them is training to tolerate the cold by huddling inside the ice cream cart, and he snaps off one of his dreadlocks :-P

[davidn]

I loved that part, too :) Like I said last night, there was something fun about the 80s that somehow you're just not allowed to do any more!

And that's pretty much the exact part that I remembered, except that I'd remembered the scream of "I hate you!" followed by going into the tunnel and not coming out again, then the calmer voices after that, without remembering what they'd said. I can often tell just before when a scene I'd remembered is going to come up - the start of the film had awakened that memory again and I had wondered if it was from this - and it's great when it does, meaning that I didn't make it up after all :)