My repeated returns to Strauss Park make of New York not only the shadow city of so many other cities I've known but a shadow city of itself, reminding me of an earlier new York in my own life, and before that of a New York which existed before I was born and which has nothing to do with me but which I need to see -- in old photographs, for example -- because, as an exile without a past, I like to peek at others' foundations to imagine what mine might look like had I been born here, where mine might be if I were to build here.
André Aciman. Shadow Cities

This is weird. I was -- reading? browsing? how do you call it what you do with comics? -- Robert Crumb's Footsy, a story of his sexual obsession with a girl's foot when he was in high school, when I had a transient, vague feeling that I have some recollection of that time. Of course, I can't have any recollections of American high school life in 1950s. My unconscious seems started to create my own personal mythology out of God knows what, using what I read or watch to fill in lacunas. I read that when we sleep, there is certain mechanism in our brain that protects us from to getting awake. It achieves this by making dreams in which problems that bother us in real life are happily resolved. Similarly, there is some mechanism at work that makes me hallucinate that I have memories of my American childhood.

As for my real childhood memories, they became not less real, but irrelevant. I don't have much use for them in defining who I am any more.