I really have no idea how common this is with other folk, but I have certain false “memories” that, no matter how much I exorcise them with facts, keep recurring. All the ones I’ve identified are dream-based.
Example: I sometimes wake in the night with a sense of loss, of having done something really, really stupid, and then I “recall”–very vividly–that I left the first car I ever bought behind in a move, just sitting in a parking space in front of a neighbor’s house with the key in it. Now, we moved from that house more than 20 years ago… and that was eighteen years after someone *cough* drove my car into the ground and had it hauled off to the junkyard while I was traveling with a music tour for the summer.
But still, every now and then, despite knowing what happened to that car, I “remember” leaving it behind, sitting in front of a neighbor’s house when my wife, kids and I moved.
Now, I’m always able to–temporarily–exorcise the “memory” and, like other false memories, I’ve always recognized it as such (though sometimes, in the middle of the night, not until I’ve given it some thought). But do I recognize all such false memories as being false?
How can I know?