About five years ago I had a vision. It was this kind of sudden hungover epiphany in which I realised that a certain childhood memory of mine, perhaps my first memory ever, was in fact, not a memory at all.

As I tried to recount the visuals of the experience, I noticed something about the memory which, until that moment, had always alluded me. Something so stupidly obvious. And that was that the little filmic strip I’d always played over in my mind, the thing I knew to be the memory itself, was not from my point of view. As in, I, Curtis, was in the memory, the character of toddler me, sat there in the hallway of our old house, playing with little plastic action figures. But that wasn’t me. I mean, how could it be? Surely if it was a true memory then every recalled visual of the experience needed to be from my own point of view; a series of subjective snapshots recorded only by my eyes.

It suddenly became clear to me that this was just some form of fake psychic home-video that my mind had created decades ago to fill the gap of some half-remembered truth. But why? And how had I never considered this before? I mean, I knew most of my memories were exaggerated and misremembered, but I never noticed how the imagistic components of these memories were completely made up.

And the more memories I waded through, core, life-defining memories, the more I realised how most of them were from similarly impossible third-person angles, all including some fictitious version of me within them.

And so what are these things? These unconscious constructed visions? Is this how our memory is supposed to work? We experience something in its infinite detail and then our consciousness translates it into a more digestible narrative? A kind of film? And why is this the case? To tell us who we are? Or who we perceive ourselves to be? Our identity? And what happens to these memories over the course of a decade, or two, or six? How long do we hold onto these imagined short films that our minds make up? When do we question their accuracy? I mean, what even drives a memory? The visuals? The facts? The emotions of a particular moment? All of the above? None of it?