Hey Pandas, What Is The Strangest Vivid Memory From Your Childhood? (Closed)

I used to bite my nails really badly, right down to the quick til I was bleeding. I'd always be in pain and dexterity was a particular issue because my fingers were always sore and red.
I've only stopped doing this in the past 5 years (better coping mechanisms were needed).

Anyway, one time when I was about 6 I bit my thumbnail down to nothing. Being a tomboy, I eventually ended up getting a lot of mud beneath the nail and it inevitably got infected. Great big, yellowy brown puss that needed to be drained out with a needle beneath your fingernail. Does this sound unpleasant yet?

Well, my mum takes me to the hospital to get it drained and she's absolutely shitting a brick, pacing, shaking, frantically waving her arms and hyperventilating, all before I've even sat in the chair. She told me constantly not to be scared and that it'd be OK.

Well the nurse comes up to me with the needle, takes the cap off and takes hold of my thumb in preparation for 'sticking me'. Suddenly there's this massive crash as my mum faints, cracking her head on the radiator in the process. The nurse gets all in a flap and rushes over to my mum, who had already regained consciousness by that point. She assures us both that she's fine and uninjured (if a little embarrassed) before she again tells me not to be scared, that it'll be alright. So, nurse attempts to once again pick up the needle and grab my thumb.

What happens? A second crash! Mum passes out yet again but this time, she takes the surgical tray and a plastic chair with her. There's utter chaos in the room as another concerned nurse comes in and I'm in absolute fits of laughter at my poor mum. The nurse promptly bans my mum from the room and syringes out the puss whilst I'm too busy laughing. I'll never forget that til the day I die. Mum took me shopping for a Teddy afterwards for 'being so brave' and I remember telling her that she should have a Teddy too for the same reasons. Love you, Ma, ya loon.

OK kiddies buckle up for this one..
I was I believe 2 and I was coming down the stairs and into the living room in my very young childhood home. I went into the room and there was a lady sitting on the sofa, beside two dolls for myself. I saw her just smiling and looking like a lady. Hair in curls, glasses, green dress and cardigan. I went into the kitchen for breakfast and she had gone by the time I had came back into the room. I remembered everything and tried asking where the lady went. No-one saw her at all. They thought I was exaggerating. Then years later I saw a picture of that lady. In the exact outfit and everything she was smiling. It was my great great granny. My family has that gift and it's never left me to this day. Seriously.

Nearly freezing to death. I was so deep into hypothermia that I couldn't figure out how to call my mother at her job, and my father had gone to the bar, so I just went through the afternoon in this odd state where nothing seemed real. Extreme detachment from surroundings. Scared the living he** outta me then, still does now when I remember it.

So I was living in Ethiopia at the time. I was like 3 or 4 at the time and we were having breakfast outside. It was a pretty flat area with lots of grass, and there was this close of trees near by. I can't remember what I was eating except for an orange on my plate. Then, out of nowhere, this orangutan jumps out from the tall grass, grabs my orange and just disappears. Scared the living daylights outta me. Had nightmares for weeks afterwards.

Theres a story with this one.

I went to Germany when i was five. I was at the winter markets in Dresden, and i went on a merry-go-round. Well when my mother was trying to help me off, she slipped and accidentally poured her entire cup of hot spiced wine into my eye. The pain was extreme, and I couldn't see for a good hour. Very vivid. I can still recall exactly how the pain felt.

Now that i think about it, I probably remember it so vividly because it was probably trauma.

I remember I was in my room (me and my sibling share a room) and I had gone into their toy box and began playing with their toys and they had no idea. Also, it had been raining heavily outside. As I secretly played with their toys (them having no idea I was in there), CLICK, all the lights suddenly go off in the house, and I let out the most bloodcurdling scream.

My Grandma starts walking down the hallway and finds me practically having a conniption fit because I am TERRIFIED of the dark at this age (still kinda am) and she simply hands me her tablet and lets me play Candy Crush, and made me a peanut butter sandwich.

I have no idea when this happened or how old I was, but I just vividly remember this happening.

I was about 5 and my kindergarten class had gone to the park (which NEVER happened). There was a little boy named Greg that I had a crush on, and he was wearing a bright red sweater. I remember following him everywhere around the park trying to hold his hand. I can see that sweater like it was yesterday. That was around 52 years ago.

I was around 5 and had the chicken pox. I remember everything clearly but this one memory my parents say didn't happen. But it's the one thing from my childhood I remember most. Anyhoo.....some point at that night a friend of my parents came over ( we lived on the second floor). My dad got upset and made him leave and I distinctly remember my dad making him tie bed sheets together to use them to climb out the window. I can still see the dude going out the window using the bed sheets to this day. 🤷

1. I'd fallen down the stairs when i was about 4 and had to be taken to hospital.... had a complete meltdown when the nurse...and later a few others, tried holding me under the x ray and I struggled like f**k whilst all the time screaming for my dad.

2. I was 5 and we were in the car travelling to a family holiday in Great Yarmouth...something came on the radio and my mum got upset and had a cry cause someone she liked very much had just died and she rambled on about him most of the trip there...which is why I knew at 5yrs old that Elvis never dodged the draft, what movies he'd been in (we watched them together in subsequent years), and just how much my mum loved his music and his hips. :)

I have a vivid memory of a dream. I had it several times as a child and it was discomforting to say the least.

I would be in one of those high gravity simulators like you see in films like Moonraker? The machine and the room it was in, everything was white, and I would be trapped in there, going round and round, faster and faster and faster.

No context, no start, no end other than waking up.

I was in my high chair which was next to the refrigerator. There was a metal strip on the side of the door where I could see my reflection. My mom also had a mechanical pencil magnetized to the fridge.
I had seen something on tv to the effect that the pupil was hollow so I decided to test it out. I took the mechanical pencil and proceeded to try and get it in the center of my eye.
I kept looking but I could see a reflection which made me think it wasn't hollow so I decided that the tv was wrong and that it wasn't a good idea.

Another weird one, sitting on the floor in my room playing. I got the taught that I didn't want to grow up, that this was probably as good as it gets. So I pondered how I could do this, couldn't stop growing, but I could pretend that my mind could stay that of a 4 year old. Rehearsed it in my head and decided it would really be hard to sustain.

I was 3. For some reason I thought I would put on every single pair of underwear I owned. After about 15 pairs, they got stuck and I had to ask mom for help to get them off

One of my most vivid memories is of my uncle during the Vietnam war. I was very young, playing on the kitchen floor at my aunts house. My mom and aunt were visiting at the kitchen table. All at once the room dimmed. I looked up toward where the light had been coming in the back door and saw a very tall, very dark silhouette blocking the sun. He seemed so big in his dress uniform. (My uncle was 6'6)

I remember my very first day of school, even though I was only 3 at the time. It was august 21st, and there was a pink turtle on the windshield of my mom’s blue Volkswagen as we drove to the Montessori school. My teacher walked me in and showed me the classroom, and then we had a lesson on how to sit crisscross.
Then I noticed the metal shapes and I started drawing a pentagon inside a circle in green and pink pencil.
Then I was asked to make biscuits with another girl, and I remember she had a long sleeved dress and I was wearing a short sleeved red dress which was pointed out as we washed our hands before cooking. While we were adding the sugar we argued on how it was spelt (sugar vs sigar, and I won). Then we became best friends and started talking about cursive writing until it was time to leave.

I was with a group of neighbor kids playing baseball in a dead end street. One of them struck out but was denying it. I was (maybe 8 at the time?) yelling that he was out and arguing with my brother when all of a sudden I was looking at the ground from a horizontal position. He'd hit me on the side of my head with the mitt and had knocked me out. I got up and I remember only a few steps of my walking home and sobbing. I went to bed. Mom woke me up for dinner and I was surprised at how bright and clear everything seemed. I realized years later that I'd probably gotten a small concussion. But I was freaked out then how the world kept getting disjointed.

I have a few memories from when I was about 2 or 3. My brother got pneumonia and my mom was on the phone waiting for emergency services to answer while holding my baby brother he was about 1 at the time and he wasn't breathing and turning blue. She told me to go downstairs and open the front door for our neighbors. We lived on the second floor apartment. I remember my neighbor doing CPR on my brother until the paramedics got there. My brother survived but it scared the living daylights out of me. A couple days later my mom and dad took me to see him in the hospital and we walked in his room and he was hanging upside down by his knees from the top of what I called the "monkey cage", it was a crib that looked like an animal cage. I remember asking my mom if we were going to bring him home in the cage.

My family was so crazy, but I'm really not making this up. When I was about three y/o, my mom, my grandma, and me went grocery shopping and wanted to get lunch at the A&W drive-in. I don't think my grandma had gone to many drive-in eating places, and on this day, she had gotten a little tipsy along the way. (I don't know why my mother let her drive, but nevertheless, she was the one ordering for us.) She couldn't get anyone to answer the intercom because she didn't know where the order button was, and my mom kept trying to tell her what to do. Eventually, someone must have seen her trying to order because a voice came out of the intercom. This startled my grandma, and with all the city noises, she was having trouble hearing the wait person on the intercom. So she thought it would be helpful if she opened the car door, planted her two feet firmly on the pavement, and grabbed the post the intercom box was mounted on. All the while my mom is whispering frantically, trying to get her back in the car (my mom can't stand being in the middle of a spectacle), but no, my grandma was determined to do the ordering. So when opening the car door, planting her feet on the ground, and grabbing the pole didn't work (she was bit a hard of hearing), she put her arms around it and rose unsteadily from the driver's seat, swaying side to side and yelling 'Hello? Can we order now?' all the while hugging the post tightly as if she were dancing with it. My mom was telling her to 'get back in the car right now', I was howling in laughter, and grandma just kept dancing with the pole (she must have been the first grandma to pole dance in public). The wait person gave up trying to get my grandma to order through the intercom, and walked out to us. My grandma still wouldn't get back in the car, and she began to try to explain to the wait person why she couldn't order, and instead of saying something like "I didn't know where the button was" she began to call the post 'him', as in 'I couldn't get him to answer when I tried to order', and 'He wasn't listening to me'. My mom is trying to apologize to tne wait person for the scene we were making, but just then, a strong gust of wind blew my grandma's wig off of her head. My grandma didn't want to lose her good wig of course, so shs went to chase it down the row of cars that were parked in the other ordering bays, while my mom was desperately trying to pull my grandma back in the car by holding onto the back of her coat. I was, by then, really concerned that grandma might really chase her wig down the sidewalk and trip and fall, so I started to whine a little. That finally got grandma's attention. And between my mom urging her to get back in the car, and the wait person chasing the runaway wig down the sidewalk, and ultimately capturing it and returning it to my grandma, we finally got her safely into the back seat, ordered, got our food and left, and all the while, my mom, fuming, drove us back to grandma's apartment. And that is the story of the day my grandma went dancing at the drive-in. I promise it's all true. My mom and I never got tired of retelling that story story.

I have an oddly vivid fragment of a memory of standing next to our cat with my hand on her back, as if she were a big dog or a pony. I think it dates from 1960. I have no idea why it stuck, but it's a good memory.

I was sitting on the floor during recess in kindergarten with my legs underneath me, and right after recess it was snack time. It was my turn to pass out snack, but when I went to get up, I couldn't bend my leg. I had subluxated my right knee. (That happened a lot when I was smaller. When this happens, I have to straighten my leg out to put it back in its socket.) Everyone had gone back to their table and I was just stuck sitting on the floor because I was too scared to move. (I remember it in a lot more detail but it's hard to explain)

Between maybe the ages of 2 and 6? I had reoccurring nightmares, which I remember vividly. They were always the same. A wolf with hooves climbed up the wall outside (I slept on the second floor) and it opened my window (it was always locked from the inside and screened in) and jumped in my bed and ate me.
To give a little background to the second part of the story, I regularly pretended that I was an orphan that ran away from my orphanage because the lady that ran it was mean (I loved “Annie”). In that game, my name was Daisy. No idea how I picked that name. Anyways, I played that game regularly, often with my parents.
Anyways, on night, I had the nightmare as usual. I woke up and started crying. I ran into my parents’ room:

Me, crying: A wolf just ate me
Mom, caringly: well then how are you talking to us? Who are you?
Me, waking up a bit: I- I’m Daisy

No recollection of what happened next, but that’s my story