I call them “false memories,” and they always occur when I’m full-on delusional. They seem completely real, and at the time I truly believe them to be real. Even after coming out of the psychosis they still seem the same as my real memories, except that they are too intense and outlandish, if not impossible, to be true - that’s the only way I can tell the difference. An example would be how I “remembered” killing someone while on a walk during a lunch break at work. I still remember all of the terrible details of that false memory, including going back to work afterward, as if nothing had happened. They are typically very intense like that. That bout with psychosis also had me thinking that, in a separate incident, I had poured liquor over a guy’s head and set him on fire. It’s awfully troubling for me when I’m in that psychotic moment and actually believe these things happened.
Yep. I had several “memories” as a child that apparently never actually happened. Like of going to a cabin in the mountains and seeing a wolf while on my dad’s shoulders, or seeing a man mastubrating in toys r us or going to see cats and other musicals…but when I was young I remembered these things clearly…
In case you’re interested, false memories happen to be a common occurrence of the dream state. As a lucid dreamer I have noticed many times that I will have memories in the dream that never really happened. I feel since psychosis is a dream state, the mental mechanism behind this is similar.
Have had false memories as well during a psychosis. I didn’t take meds for about a year and began to have memories about being tortured with a knife. It never happened and it leaves me flabbergasted (for lack of a better word at the moment) about what schizophrenia can do to the mind.
Yes I have had them as well like being so drunk I pissed on the floor in a nightclub and having my drink spiked while there was an orgy in the night clubs etc… pretty ■■■■■■ up ■■■■.
My first psychotic episode, yes tons of them. Just flooded with false memories about how i had cancer and how i contracted it and how everyone was warning me about my cancer…went on for a couple months.
I remember a police helicopter landing on the street in front of my house. Didn’t happen.
I don’t really perceive them as false memories. My mind certainly has experienced everything that it remembers, whether it was only psychosis or it was something that happened in the physical world, as well. I distinguish the two categories, so I can say that something was not “real” in the sense that it did not happen in the physical world. Yet my mind absolutely experienced it, and thus I experienced it, and so it has been a part of my life experience. Or another way of putting it, is that I could say to someone else if they had been there at the time, that I know they did not experience it, because it was not of the physical world, the world that we share together, but I absolutely still experienced it.
I draw that distinction because I have encountered too many professionals and people in general who seem to conclude that if something you experienced did not happen in the physical world, then it shouldn’t affect you, which is a very ridiculous notion. The distinction matters when it comes to relating with others, very much so. I can’t expect anyone else to behave as though some aspects my psychotic experiences also happened in their world, because they didn’t. But likewise it is foolish of them to expect me to behave as though I haven’t experienced what I have, even if nobody else was experiencing it with me.