Recollections reclaimed
Reading Philip Ball’s feature in July’s issue (July, p73) brought to mind one of my clearest childhood memories of a camping holiday. Everything had been packed away, except the tent in which my mother and I sheltered from the rain while my father went off in the car to collect something. He’d been gone a long time and we were getting worried when he and our car reappeared being towed into the site by a shire horse!
I’ve retold the story many times over the years but recently my mother pointed out that, although the event did happen, it occurred before I’d been born.
Initially, I found it impossible to believe such a clear memory could be false, but on reflection I realised I must be wrong because I had an elder brother who would have been there but was not part of my memory. I can only assume that I heard the story when I was young and at some later point my memory switched to make me part of the tale.
Geoff Dunwell, Maidenhead
Not so sweet dreams
With regard to the question ‘Do babies have nightmares?’ (June, p86), I believe they do. I had a repetitive one from as far back as I can remember. In the nightmare, I’d be lying down staring out of a stable door into inky blackness, then I’d be clutched all over by a piercing pain as if I’d been grabbed by pincers. The nightmares grew less frequent with age and after my mid-teens I never had it again.
Later in life my mother told me that my birth had been arduous and forceps were needed pull me from her womb. This chimed with what I was dreaming about and I believe I was recalling the moment of my birth in my sleep.
It’s long been recognised that babies can hear while in the womb, but has anyone ever considered that they might also be developing an ability to perceive moments prior to their birth in some way? The fact that babies do such a lot of sleeping suggests that they might. If sleeping is a time for sensory absorption and mental organisation, it’s no wonder they spend so much time in the land of nod.
Roger Britton, via email
Oops…
In the June issue (p79), it was wrongly stated that particles and antiparticles have opposite spin, and that this only has values of 1/2 or 1. They have the same spin, and its value can be zero, 1/2, 1 or multiples of these values, depending on the type of particle.
Also in the June issue (p17), a picture caption in a news story listed the Gaia mission as NASA. It is, of course, ESA.