Early Doors

I know you'll be sceptical about this. I'm sceptical about it myself and I'm writing this stuff!

This is a very vivid memory of a brief moment in time. I was a baby, in a pram, no more than a few months old.

My parents lived about a mile from my grandmother, in a town on the south coast of England. My mother had pushed me in the pram from our home to visit my grandmother.

It was on the way back home that the memory kicks in. I experienced something akin to an out of body experience. This is how I remember it...

The pram was a big shiny black number with thin silver detailing on the sides. It had a white cross-bar handle attached to the frame of the pram by chromium arms. It had big wheels with chrome spokes and thin white tyres with a black stripe around the tyre walls. I was dressed in white baby clothes and wore a white knitted cap. The covers and pillows in the pram were also white.

It was a very hot, sunny day - not a cloud above. I remember looking up at the bright blue sky. The black hood of the pram was up, providing shade and protection. The shade and the black hood contrasted the bright blueness of the sky.

My mother stopped to talk to a friend. We were about 100 yards from my grandmother's house on the left hand-side of Barnes Road heading east, just before a dip and the right turning to Hendford Road. I remember the pale greyness of the tarmac that was the pavement and road. The ground was shimmering in the heat.

As my mother and her friend talked I became aware that I was looking back at them, and also at me, from above the end of the pram!

The real me was wide awake in the pram, my mother was on the left of the pram and her friend was on the other side. They were both looking at me (the version of me in the pram) and talking and smiling at me – I was looking from side to side at them as they talked.

The other me floated above them for a few minutes and then the image faded away.

I mentioned all this to my mother when I was much older and she remembered it clearly, but she wouldn't say why it was also such a vivid memory for her.

Was I dreaming?

Was it a real experience?

When do we acquire this level of consciousness about such early events in our lives?