There's no way to reconstruct reality. It happened once. What you do is reinterpret and recreate. Even if you have the person who lived it and did it next to you, the event happened just once.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I don't think there's such a thing as autobiographical fiction. If I say it happened, it happened, even if only in my mind.
Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.
For people who are displaced, you can reconstruct the story of your life from the objects you have access to, but if you don't have the objects then there are holes in your life. This is why people in Bosnia - if anyone was running back into a burning house, it was to salvage photos.
Even under normal conditions, how we can distinguish various events, various experiences, and be able to reproduce it later is, of course, a very interesting question and, I think, one that we face in day to day life.
You can't recover memories of a missing event. That's a fallacy.
I always felt like reality was a bizarre place, and everybody was really good at being normal, and I didn't know how to do it.
Memories are thoughts that arise. They're not realities. Only when you believe that they are real, then they have the power over you. But when you realize it's just another thought arising about the past, then you can have a spacious relationship with that thought. The thought no longer has you in its grip.
Sometimes I think my past life was unrealized. I met a tragic end - it might have been a car over a cliff. But it's true, I came from another time and place, and landed in Paris Hilton's backyard.
Two hundred or more years ago most people on the planet were never aware of any reality other than the one into which they were brought up.
In reality, the past is preserved by itself automatically.