The Preception of Memory by Tina Erwin

         Recently my husband was sharing a story of an event that took place in Naples, Italy when we lived there some 37 years ago. He was telling this story with gusto because it was unnerving for him. However for me, the issue wasn’t the story but how he remembered it. I had a somewhat different memory of the event. The point of this story is why we each have such different memories. But let us focus on this one story and then go over why we each remembered one key fact so differently.

         In this story, we were returning from a Navy party way out in the country. It took a full 40 minutes to drive back into downtown Naples. We had a top floor apartment on Posillipo hill, right on the bay of Naples. Our apartment overlooked the entire bay of Naples, including Sorrento and the islands of Ischia and Capri. However to get to the final street that would wind us up the mountain to our apartment, we had to drive through a very long tunnel, then turn right, past a traffic circle and then past 12-story apartment buildings that lined both sides of the street.

         Normally, as we came out of that tunnel and turned right, we would get our first glimpse of the Bay of Naples, this glorious view tightly wedged between these two 12-story apartment buildings. It was a ‘T’ intersection with a stoplight. Turn left at this intersection and you head for the center of downtown Naples hugging this glorious bay. Turn right and you enter the Mergillina area and begin to head up the mountain on Via Posillipo. Because the mountains that overlook Naples Bay are so populated with gorgeous villas, there is another major road that intersects with Via Posillipo and Mergillina: Via Petrarca.

         So here is the scene that should have happened:

         We come out of the tunnel,

         We turn right toward the stoplight that is 300 yards ahead of us.

         The light was green and my husband is accelerating to the light.

         We should have flown through the green light and made a slight right turn toward Via Posillipo, past the intersection with Via Petrarca.

         But here is what actually happened at 2am in that incredibly memorable moment. It is also important to mention that in 1977, Naples was a ghost town in the middle of the night. We had driven for 35 minutes and had not seen another car anywhere. We felt like we had the city to ourselves, snug in our fast red Fiat MiraFiori. We thought we would be reaching our apartment in a matter of minutes.

         But this is what actually happened that fateful night.

         We came out of that tunnel.

         We turned right toward the stoplight that is 300 yards ahead of us. We can see the slim view of the twinkling lights of the night fishermen ahead of us, and the wine dark sea past that.

         But in that astonishing moment, I didn’t see any of that. All I could ‘see/sense’ was that there was something very wrong about racing toward that intersection. The light was green and my husband was accelerating toward that green light. That nagging sense that something was terribly wrong gripped me.

         “Troy you have to slow down, slow down now.”

         “Are you nuts?” he demanded. “I’ve got a green light.”

         “No, SLOW DOWN RIGHT NOW.” I demanded in an ever-louder voice.

         “I’m slowing down, but we have the green light? Why should I slow down?”

          “Slow down more, hurry, quickly, slow down now! Just do it!” I’m yelling now, as if something has come over me and I can ‘see’ that if we don’t slow down something terrible is going to happen.

         Troy applies the brakes more and more and we are now a few feet from driving through that still green light.

         “Stop the car!!”  I’m screaming at him now. “Stop the car immediately, DO IT.”

         And as he brings the car to a full stop, another car comes out of absolutely nowhere utterly ignoring the fact that he has a red light and should stop. But he doesn’t stop, he slows down when he sees us – finally – and then he continues on his way.

         Some part of me ‘saw’ him coming. If Troy hadn’t slowed down, we would have been hit and if we hadn’t stopped, we would have killed the man in the other car. Only bringing our car to a complete top saved us both.

         As the other car proceeded on, we noted that there was not another car in sight, anywhere, only two cars on a collision course stopped by an unseen feeling that saved us all. Troy pretty much demanded to know in a very loud voice how I could have known that that car was there and how I knew to stop. He freaked out all the way up Posillipo hill.

         Needless to say, this was the beginning of a lifetime of remote viewing, because in this case I could ‘see’ past those 12-story apartment buildings to perceive that lone messenger of potential death for us all on the other side of those buildings.

         But this isn't the point of the story.

         The point of the story is that when Troy is telling the story, he remembers the car coming from the right, down Via Petrarca towards Mergillina. However, I remember the car as coming from the downtown area, coming from the left, not the right.

         When Troy told the story I listened and did not correct him. His perception of the event is his alone. I remembered the key element of the story very differently. So who's right?

         It doesn’t matter who is right. We see this all the time, especially between couples or family members who are all party to the same event yet have decidedly different recollections of one or more key features of the event. You often hear one spouse or family member immediately correct the other, smugly believing that the other person has to be wrong, that there can only be one correct memory of an event. But what if it is possible for there to be two accurate versions of an event?

         Is this why ‘eye witness’ accounts are so routinely suspect? Does our perception of an event color our memory of it? What creates this influence?

         I remember an event with both my brothers and my father. It involved a dark colored car. All four of us remembered that the car was dark, but we each specifically remembered a different car color.  The cop threw up his hands: if four eye witnesses, standing side by side cannot agree on the color of the car, what is the truth in any situation?

         Perhaps the truth is that we each perceive reality slightly differently. This does not make anyone’s perception wrong. It makes it simply their perception and nothing more.

         So if you are telling a story and someone corrects you, you have good ground to tell him or her that your version of the story is based on your perception of the moment and is not right or wrong. It’s a perception. Perhaps correcting someone else would also be something that you would want to forgo in the future, especially if you are able to acknowledge and allow that other people are just as equally entitled to their perception as you are.