False memories

In my last posting I mentioned false memories as being amongst the reasons people thought they'd been abducted by UFOs. I don't think I've been abducted by a UFO, although it's tempting to think that the reason I act the way I do might be attributed to aliens, but I'm sure I have a few false memories here and there. We humans, with those imperfect things called memories, are under a lot of influences. We can remember things that never happened.

Barb, a school secretary I encounter on my route, has reminded me several times when she met me I had long hair in a ponytail. I got my long hair cut in 1981, and was sure I hadn't met her until years later. As I pinned her down on the year she started working at the school district I found it was 1988, long after the ponytail was history. How had she remembered it? Because she worked with another lady who had worked with me in the late '70s and told her. As Barb and I established a working relationship her friend's memory became Barb's memory.

How many things do we actually remember, and how many we remember for some extraneous reason like that? I wonder how many things I have in my head that happened to me that actually didn't, that I may have seen on the ABC Movie Of The Week. Whew. The mind boggles.

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Believe in synchronicity? I do. I mentioned a couple of things in my last posting, the false memories and creationists who believe dinosaurs existed at the same time as people 6,000 years ago, and saw those things the next day in the Sunday comic strips. If you pay attention there are a lot of coincidences in life, some of them meaningful, some not, but when they happen to me I always pay attention.