can anyone actually remember being born? the reason I ask, is someone whom I work with says they can remember being born, which is a load of crap in my eyes. But it posed an interesting side question, if we cant remember being born, can we remember dying? So that makes me wonder, what if I'm already dead, and these beings around are just apart of my perceived reality.

you need some beer.




[Edited on 2-4-2003 by krossfyter]

I dont think its possible to remember being born. There's just no way.

I doubt anyone can remeber their own birth. I cannot remember my own birth or much of my life until about age 6 or so. I remeber seeing my brothers being born. Maybe there is some way to remember, but I dount so.

I think that person is pulling your leg. It seems impossible to remember that far back.

Yes yes it is possible. Remember that what you call "time" is an illusion. When you die people often say "whole life flashes" Not the case, your brain in the last miliseconds realises some new things.

Probably a good thing that you can't remember it.

Think of how traumatic it must be ...

forced out of your warm wet dark place
through a narrow tunnel which tries to crush you
into a place that it horryfing - intense light, intense sound, intense feeling on the skin,
then you get your cord cut - pain

or worse you get turned upside down and slapped on your a$s.

(in tylers case, his face)

talk about massive sensory overload, it would scar you for life, so I imagein the baby can sort of shut down until it calms down...

But the problem is that it's engraved in the back of our brains we don't recall it. Of course it's there, we have memories of being inside of the womb, it's all somewhere engraved in the brain. If we use enough brain power we can remember it. Remember, humans don't use their brains to their potential.

@ "or worse you get turned upside down and slapped on your a$s. "

i can remember bouncing in the door frame in a baby bouncer.i told my grandmother one day when one of my cousins was in it.she looked a bit shocked and said "this is a new one"."you were 6 months old when one of the elastic strands in yours snapped".i thought it was mine she was in you see..i also remember looking up at what i now know to be a steering wheel.my mother said when i was a baby i was sometimes terrible to get to sleep.the only way she could do it was to catch the bus into town and back.she said we sat at the side of the driver.i was going to ask a similar question.those are just pictures colour ones but pictures all the same.what i wanted to know was can anyone remember when they became consciously aware of themselves?i was 5 years old and my mother was washing the pots.i was sat on the settee behind her.i walked over to the sink and asked her "what year is it".

Setting to one side any talk of reincarnation, archetypes, race memories and what you will, you'll find a long tradition of Western "therapists" who insist one can remember birth and any and all accompanying traumas and who will also insist that, with the aid of hypnosis and dollars, these events can be recalled.
As ever, proving something "isn't" the case is fraught with difficulties -empirical and logical -and these people need only to convince their patients (who perhaps have problems they wish to "deal with" ( or blame on someone/something else), in order to justify their claims.
Estragon does not accept that there is a single"thing" called "memory": it is too complex a phenomenon; but I tend to associate it with the development of language and as such, I am not surprised, that one remembers little if anything of one's early years.
Also, if (for once) I am in any way typical, childhood recollection is further complicated by the endless accounts of one's childhood activities that one is obliged to listen to from older relatives (aunts are notoriously vicious in this regard), who recall these events from a time at which they had an adult command of language, to the point where one is almost convinced that one really does remember the event (although one is actually remembering only repeated second-hand accounts of the event)

I had a re accuring dream a lot up until I was about 12, which I always found hard to describe. I was in a strange state of suspension, surrounded by particles and yet part of what I was suspended in. I could hear/feel a rhymic beating. The dream always started with a feeling of calmness and then suddenly the beating intensified and I became anxious, getting this feeling of acceleration. It wasn't until I saw a documentry a few years ago where scientists had placed a camera inside the womb of a mother about to give birth, that I suddenly realised what I had been dreaming about was the moment just before birth.

So no I have no direct memories of my birth, but I certainly had a sense of it in my dreams.

I can also remember quite a lot about my very early childhood. I checked with my mother on a few things and some of my memories go back to when I was only about 2 or 3 years old

[Edited on 3-4-2003 by arc]

fascinating, Arc: you will, however, find that this relatively common dream, like the tunnel and the light, of near-death accounts, can be explained in purely physiological terms ( it should be easy to search this).
Of course, all sorts of things can be explained: doesn't make the explanation valid or true.

Hi there!
I dont remember being born, and I don't think anyone can remember it.....um....cohesively, you could say. My earliest memory was when I was just a little over a year old, and its really doesnt make a lot of sense because everything is so out of perspective, because, obviously, at that age so many things are confusing and so much larger that you. So I would think if anyone did remember it, it wouldnt make any sense to them, really, because their mind at the time would have had no way to wap itself around what was occuring and put it into any sort of perspective their adult mind could translate.
On memories in general, I've found that most people I know, their earliest memories are from around age five...I find that almost tragic, because I remember pretty much everything from age two and on. As for the comment that memory might relate to speech, I agree to a point. I think memory is linked to abstract thought. For instance, I remember much further back than most people I know, and I also began to read at the age of three. Reading is one of the first taught forms of abstract thought that we are introduced to, and I think for a lot of children, it is some of the first, thus a lot of people only remembering from around the same time as most of them learned to read.

when i was 2 years old i wandered off with 2 of my friends.we walked about a mile and a half from where we lived.i remember where we went i remember the old car we found and played in and i remember the woman who found us and took us to her house before contacting our parents to let them know where we were.i also remember sitting at the top of my friends steps at 4 years old talking about starting school.i remember the conversation that because 3 of us were starting together and one a bit later.we decided even though we were all 4 that we were a year older than him lol.i also have lots of other memories from before i started school but i couldnt tell you what day the next day was when they happened because i simply wasnt aware that we had 7 days in a week.i dont hold to the thought you can remember this because of that but do think people remember so little of their childhood for the same reason you cant remember what you did 3 weeks ago last thursday for instance.i dont know if memory has anything to do with the development of language though because deaf mutes who cant sign have memories too.the memory i have at 5 years old stands out for me because i can remember what i was thinking while it was happening.

you are not dead because you arent in heaven or hell thats where you go after you die. lol i think its very funny that youre friend thinks he can remember when he was born. lol ha ha yeah right

at the time of birth...there's no reason you wouldn't actually be able to remember this...just that as Illmatic mentioned, it's likely buried pretty deep...

I bet that regression would work...though as was mentioned, who'd want to remember that?

I once read that all our memories aren't 'stocked' in our brains, but in the 'energy' that's around us, and it's stocked like a holograph, everything you've been trough can be recalled (during hypnosis?) so you live that moment again. It also said you can relive someone elses life, you can like go into his holo-memory and see what he once saw....? Maybe I should look for the link.

If it's like this then you could remember your own birth, maybe this guy can somehow recall these things better than others, and that way he can remember his birth..?

Or he's just telling nonsense....?