Memories are untrustworthy creatures.
There is no proof that the events that memories consist of ever actually happened. Poll three people about an event or a series of events and, while you may get some collaboration about the event, perhaps even strong correlations of memories, there will still be three different recollections about the event as it unfolded. Those recollections, the drawing on memory to relate a history, will all vary based on the key things that each of the three brains decided to retain as important to the event. What was important is coloured by what was emotionally significant at the time.
As the memories are filled with other memories, the brain tends to sort out and filter out some of the details and after a stage, only fragments remain – usually those perspectives most shadowed by emotion.
As I write this, I am fully aware that the memories my mind is turning over and that are keeping me from sleep are primarily illusion, but I am still struck with insomnia as I try to find some collaboration between the different memories I have of several periods of my life.
I wonder at the value of retaining those memories. If I cannot rely on the memories, are they little better than debris from a past that may be sheer fantasy? Should it not be better that everything seems so vague and doubtful? If things in the past are no longer in existence, then am I not clinging to shades and shadows that would be better cast aside and truly forgotten? If so, why does my mind still find value in those thoughts?
Might it not be best if we forgot the things that make memories as soon after the event as possible? After all, if there is a question as to the veracity of the thought – perhaps it should be cast away like anything else we fail to find trust in.
There are some who claim to have perfect memories, but my own experience with those people has been that their confidence in their own memories is rarely founded in repeatability – the memories are perfect each time, but chimerically change with each recollection. From where I stand, claims of perfect memory a more functions of a attempt at securing the ego than a function of true perfect memory.