What is your earliest Memory / Can you remember being Born ?

I am 65 now. I can remember back to when I was 2 years old. That was when I had my tonsils removed. I can remember standing in a crib looking out of the hospital window at my dad walking up to the hospital on the sidewalk.

Age 3

Siting with my dad at a restaurant eating soup

Him telling me that he has to go to live elsewhere

Him giving me a tiny book called little prayers and him reading me a poem :

Father taking his child's hands into his palms is like a bird's home in a nest

a reply to: miniatus

thanks for the link, I shall check that out later !

I know our mind can trick us and I am open to any theories......but.....it is just that this " birth memory " if that is even what it is has no language, or even proper images. It is just feelings and fluid sensory type perceptions, and they don't feel good at all.
They feel violent and terrifying.

I have considered that hearing family chatter going on around you can easily be translated by our minds into a false memory which we are duped into believing is our own.

I don't think this is that

a reply to: cosmickat

I can remember before I was born, and the event haunted me for many decades. Still does, but I think I will wait until I've figured out how to download my anemone (Yea.)

I also have memories somewhat similar to 5StarOracle, or perhaps it was supposed to go that way, but I messed it up.

Anyway, thanks for this thread. I have been thinking this and wondering about others on ATS regarding this.

originally posted by: Newt22
I wondered if there were other people that thought of this. AND if there was similarities. There seems to be... trauma based..

My earliest memories is similar in that it was before I could form words. In fact I remember thinking in the memory.

I was between 9 and 10 months old. My crib was in a corner of the room that got a beam of sunlight shooting into it in the late winter months.

I was put down to sleep while it was daylight, but, was woke by the sun beaming into my eyes. I remember crying and the tears caused prisms to appear and it stunned me. I remember thinking 'pretty' but without words, and, what the heck are those things? I was baffled a bit that I didn't know what they were, and, the act of questioning... what was I doing? Then my tears dried because I stopped crying, so, I cried again and they came back! However, then the sun went down and I went to sleep. My first memory was a rainbow.

A rainbow What a beautiful thing to have as a first memory

thank you for sharing

a reply to: dogstar23

thank you for posting

very early memory

a reply to: Ceeker63

again, would have been a traumatic time for you as a baby, maybe there is a correlation there

thanks for replying

a reply to: ClownFish

I would be interested to read your thread on this, if you should make one

a reply to: Layein

thank you for sharing

this early memory sounds sad

originally posted by: cosmickat
a reply to: nerbot

this is freaky ...freaky because it sounds exactly like what I have experienced !

do you still have a clear memory of this even today ?

Absolutely, although it doesn't scare me any more because it all makes sense. I can close my eyes and imagine the same sensations at any time.

a reply to: cosmickat

Following that early one, I remember my dad holding me up on his shoulders to keep me safe from the dog (a beagle) who was old and had apparently hit her limit of having children running around, that was about 1½. Then at 2½, getting caught hiding behind the curtains eating Easter candy from my basket at 5am on Easter Sunday lol. Those are my 3 earliest memories.

What's interesting is, since having children of my own, I've been continually remembering all kinds of relatively minor things from my young childhood, besides these long-time standout memories. I've always found it interesting that ALL of the memories, including details not even noticed at the time of the event, are stored in our brains somewhere. It's cool when something triggers a memory from long ago.

I live my life in 30 minute intervals. I barely remember yesterday.

This is a thread I started long ago: Around 2009

Do you remember being born?

I am sorry if this has been posted before but I am new here and thought
I might get some interesting points of view from you. I will try to make this
straight and directly to the point if I can.

When I was around my mid 20's I always had a haunting feeling that I had
remembered being born and a few other experiences after early birth. These feelings happened while I was fully awake and it's starts as a feeling of deja vu then a feeling of remembering being born ...coming through the birth canal and lights.

I remember being in something see through and people standing over me constantly fussing. I remember them holding my hands ..I know it sounds so strange.
I also had a memory of again being in something see through and it covering me and being able to see my mother around me doing what I know now to be everyday things the one thing that sticks in my mind was ironing.
So here I am in my mid 20's (then, now I am in my 40's)and involved in a conversation with family members reminiscing about the past they acted oddly that I remember much more then they did and in detail. At that point I said straight out I remember everything that happened to me as a child
and I even remember being born! They laughed of course ....so I repeated the experiences stated above, my mom then says that's impossible for you to know that you were a baby and we never told you! She also said you spent almost 3 weeks in a incubator in the hospital because you weren't even 4lbs when you were born your lungs weren't fully developed yet.

When we took you home you had to have your crib in a oxygen tent for awhile and the room that you were in we had to just about do everything there
to keep a close watch over you and I did sew and iron as close to the crib
as I could to keep a eye on you.
So I think I did remember this at such a young age. I felt this untill I reached 40 which was a few years ago. Now it feels like my memory card is full and those memories were being deleted I don't feel them as strong anymore.I know they happened because of the conversation with my mom. I just wondered always if anyone ever felt this because every so often I speak of it and my husband just rolls his eyes at me.
Thanks for listening to me ramble, it would be great even if one person felt this way!

~Peace

The thing about memory is it is easy to develop false memories that seem 100% real. It is highly unlikley that anyon can remember further back than 3yrs old. Even then its likley to just be a snapshot rather than a recall of events.

What tends to happen is other people tell you about things that have happened when you were super young and in an effort to remember what you are told your brain will reconstruct the memory which then just gets logged away with all the real memories. This usually happens by accident at quite a young age when people who were there when the event happened will ask you if you remember it. This explains why most of the super early memories that people think they can remember involved interactions with other people.

This was recently proved in a documentary called memory hackers. People were brought into a psychologists office and asked about thier childhood. They were then told about a made up event that was supposed to have happened to them when they were young. They were told to go away and think about it and come back in a week. When they came back a week later they were comvinced they could remember the false event.

One of the resons its almost impossible to remember before the age of three is at that age you had no frame of refference to rember things by.

For myself i know i moved from one city to another when i was 5 and i seem to remember having 2-3 memories before that happened but i couldnt tell you exactly at what age they happened. My earliest memory was a dream that i had about a space rocket outside my bedroom window . I remember telling my mother about it and she explained to me it must have been a dream. I was totally convinced the rocket ship had been real and had no idea what a dream really was at that point. That must have been round the age of three.

a reply to: 5StarOracle

OMG! I thought I was the only crazy person to have the same memory! Wow!

You are the first person in my 57 years to tell a similar story of a memory before you were born, I have the same memory!

Here is what I remember, and I cannot forget it.

I remember being taken out of complete darkness by two entities of light, one on each side of me, I remember seeing a pin hole of light in the distance and the closer we got the brighter it got, it was brilliant until we were surrounded in a strange room of the most beautiful light.

One of the entities told me to look to the right of the room, I saw what look like flat curved TV's all joined together, I was told to take in all the images and not to forget them.

What I saw was the history of the world, I saw many wars, births, deaths of many people, I saw weddings, beautiful country sides, I saw horribly storms, earth quakes, and more deaths, I saw so many different kinds of diseases, I saw famine, I saw great Nation rise and fall from different time periods and more deaths. I saw volcanoes erupting and more deaths, I saw good times and bad times in many people's lives, On the last screen I saw a Nucular explosion, many of them.

I was told by the two entities to take all this in and remember it. I also remember other being's in the room they were all wearing white long robes, It seems they were faceless, I don't see their faces. I don't see floors, ceilings, or walls.

I then remember one of the entities telling me to look to the left, I saw three flat curved TV's joined together in a curved position, I saw three different sets of parents, their life from beginning to end and them being my parents, I was told to select one set of parents to be my family.

I remember saying, I don't want to do this. One of the entities which I believe are my spirit guides told me that I have to do this, you have a "choice" in selecting your parents, choose the one that will but you on your right path.

I remember saying that I was afraid, the guide giggled and said you never have to be afraid, we are always with you, we will help guide you in your life and don't forget that.

I chose the worst of the three sets of parents and now I understand why. I am a survivor of sever child abuse. Long story short here, I put myself through 16 years of therapy and I was able to forgive my parents for what they did to me and move on with my rewarding life today. Although I haven't seen my parents since I was 14 years old, and just choose not to.

My life lesson was to learn to "forgive". Had I not been unloved and tortured as a child, I really don't believe I would have learned to "forgive."

My memory is true, I was born with it and still remember it today. You are the first person to recant a very similar memory.

I have told close friends about this memory, but they all think I am crazy, they don't believe me.

The memory is very real to me.

I have a lot to say about this topic so much.

I am also an empath, I can pick up good and bad energies from people. I can't stand to be in crowed place because it drains me. I have had many experiences with ghosts, good and bad spirits. I have also had several after death communication ( ADC ) from loves one's that have passed away and was able to give information that has shocked people very close to me.

I am happy that you wrote your story today this gives me confirmation that my memory is very real and I thank you for sharing it us.

Anyway this whole time someone else was with me always standing behind me...
it felt like they knew all about me and I was entirely comfortable with them...
and although I had to choose where and when...
there was no choice on whether or not to choose to be...
a decision had to be made...

Mine was "exactly" the same. I felt the spirit guide knew me and I felt he was a male and I was very comfortable with him and Yes, he stood behind me most of the time.

You are right, that a decision had to be made in chosen a parent. I couldn't get out of it.

There's next to no chance of memories existing from infancy to adulthood due to the way the brain develops and how memories are rewritten dynamically. Every time we recall a memory it's altered so a well-recalled memory will have layers of context added to it until it's substantively different from the first version. An essence will remain like the grit at the centre of a pearl and we should be very objective in how we tease it out from the added layers.

That being said, I have a memory of a nightmare I had when I was younger than four; it was a sense nightmare with no visuals. I was nothing but an awareness and a sound ebbed and flowed around me. As it got louder, it got closer and at its loudest, I felt pain. The sound and pain would then fade away and I'd relax. The sound would then increase and come closer until I was in the middle of a suffocating pain again. I'd 'tense' to resist the constrictions and sort of surrendered to the pain because I accepted it and waited for it to pass. It was repeated for what seemed like forever until I woke with tears.

What I suspect is this nightmare was a memory of birth. I was late to be born and it was a bad, forceps affair that left me in an incubator for a few days.

Another early memory was being two years old and climbing a ladder into what was to become the upstairs in a dormer. This memory is attested to by my parents who were proud that their little kid wasn't afraid of heights. At five I was climbing out my bedroom window to sit on the roof of the house and enjoying the view - this is also a validated memory because my dad found some of my toys up there.

I must admit this is fascinating. Personally, I can only admit to a traumatic memory that occurred when I was 4-5 years old. It is still clear to me this day of my dad and mom fighting. Her face was all bloody and blood splattered across the cabinets in the kitchen. I was crying and trying to make him stop by running up and plummeting on his backside.

Within this same time frame, I remember the trauma of my dad getting ready to shoot a german shepherd that had bitten some kids. The dog was chained and he was getting ready to shoot it. I was upset since the bully kids who teased the dog deserved the bites. So I rushed past the circle of family and grabbed the dog by the neck in a hug. Scared, it visciously snapped at my face! Family dragged me away kicking and screaming with blood all over me and I heard the loud bangs of my dads pistols.

Earlier memories were more sketchy and not traumatic it seems so I think that family home movies and storytelling over photo albums had created those earlier ones. So I have to admit that I have to personally give more credit to memories that are not a shared photographic reference.

thanks ! everyone for these replies.

Reading all these accounts it seems like many of us do have these early birth memories ( and even pre - birth ! wow ! )
This is all so intriguing to me, if nothing else for the pure scientific premis that says we shouldn't be able to remember.

I am glad to know that others have had the same or very similar memories.

a reply to: PhoenixOD

Framework is not memory, and not all people can recall the the same way, or, even the same amount. I know my memory is unaltered because of the formless feel of thinking without words... I remember the 'feel' of thinking anew... my formed thinking can not add to formlessness.

I play the flamenco guitar... I play the same blazing fast songs the same blazing fast way every time... or the dancers will kick my butt and no one benefits from a dancer stomp fest... it's a little humiliating :-). You can access without altering or I would play it ounce then get a beat down...

AND... what about autodiatic people? Are they altering their formulae every time they think on a subject?

Be careful of the science of absolutes... especially our absolutes for they seldom stay that way.

a reply to: cosmickat

I have a memory, which I admit can read as a bit dreamlike in the sense that, I find it really difficult to translate the memory into language. Instead it is like a collection of sensory images and feelings that seem to hover just outwith the reach of my grasp. But this is not a dream, or a dream memory. I know it is not, because decades later I can still feel the experience.

Same here.

My earliest memory is a feeling of being crushed and then a bright light, and low pitched, like slowed down voices.

Something that always stuck with me through childhood and gradually subdued as I got older.

I figured it was either a memory of birth or possibly my death in the previous life.