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Good God. Yes. Those things do get embedded into our memories. I know exactly what you mean

I got a taste of that terrible experience of memory you described just a few short years ago.

A cyclist splitting the lane between the two lanes of traffic collided with the front left fender of my car as I pulled through a line of traffic, and for about three months, anytime my mind was not occupied with some task, it would replay in my head. It was a 1 or even 1.5 second sequence of what I saw, indelibly recorded and burned into my brain.

But even though it was only about a second in real life, the clip stretched on in super slow-motion, ultra-high definition mode, and I could see the cyclist in sharp vivid color, perfect ballet-like tandem with his bike, cartwheeling head over heels past my field of view.

It would play over and over again, the fidelity exactly the same as a digital copy of a movie.

Thankfully after three months the vision became less frequent, and lost some of its fidelity, to the point now when I deliberately conjure it up, it is grainy and indistinct, degrading with time.

Funny thing though-early on, as high definition and super slow motion as it was, I could never see the features of the guy’s face.

The face was an oblong, pale oval, with a dark black hole where the mouth was gaping open. No eyes, nose, ears, eyebrows, lips...nothing. Just pale white with the gaping dark mouth in a silent scream. As he went from left to right, tumbling, I could see his bare calves, the biking shoes, the spokes of the wheels spinning, even as the bike was cartwheeling, and the composite frame of the expensive bike,

But even with all that detail, I could never make out the features of his face.

Anyway. I don’t see it unbidden now. I have to think of it. Thankfully. And I wasn’t even physically injured. But I sure had a tough time getting it out of my mind.

But I did have a very jarring related experience that made me accept even more deeply the unique character of memories of that nature.

I had heard that the series “Better Call Saul” was pretty good, and I liked the guy when I had seen him in “Breaking Bad”, so late one night (about six months after the accident) I was all by myself, completely relaxed, in my own living room, and put one of the early episodes on.

It started off with the main character driving down the road of a suburban neighborhood, the camera just behind and to the right of his head, so you could see part of the back of his head, and out the front windshield as if you were driving.

The guy was turning this way and that, kind of lazily, as he talked on the phone to someone (I think)

Then...WHAM!

In an instant, from being completely relaxed and safe, my heart was pounding, and I felt encased in a cocoon of terrible panic. I fumbled wildly for the hand controller, juggling and wiggling it trying to shut the whole system off, all the while hoarsely saying “F**k! F**k! F**k!”

I thought I was completely over it. I wasn’t seeing it or dreaming about it (or compulsively relating it to someone) and was very relaxed, the thought of the accident wasn’t even in the same solar system I was, it was that far out of my mind.

But the vision, looking out the windshield of that car, and the abrupt WHAM as the guy hit some person on a bike...it reached down and made it real in a fraction of a second, and I didn’t even see that coming.

If that is a common experience (and I think it is) my heart breaks for people like soldiers, police, or firefighters who have undergone REAL trauma of some kind (I wasn’t even physically scratched) and experience anything like what I did.