It's interesting that both you and the author mention recalling things and simultaneously knowing that you hadn't recalled them before. When you remember something, it rarely brings to mind the specific situation in which you last remembered that thing. But apparently, somehow, you remember that you have remembered it at some point, enough to be startled when you haven't!
In my case it was a lot of the memories from things in college, things I knew I didn't remember from classes and things. A few things from the jobs I worked around that time too. I could usually tell it was something I couldn't remember before simply because it didn't fit anywhere for a while, just the middle or end of something that happened and didn't connect anywhere. Sometimes it made me feel like I was going a bit crazy and wasn't sure of what they were right away. Smells and sounds seemed to be the biggest things that surfaced things, sights less so. There were a few times where I'd remember a song I heard during that time and it took me a year or so to figure out what the hell the song was, those in particular drove me the most nuts because I've very little talent for music so until I remember more than a word or two from it I couldn't figure it out. It was actually something that was hard to talk about at first simply because it's so bizarre and unfamiliar that you can't really seem to express it in a way that feels right.
Woah this shows how sleep plays a role in organizing memory, if your condition was restricted to sleeping. Interestingly the effect was similar to the other guy (memories fine but indexes missing). Did you contact any researcher/anyone contact you?
Those are just some articles from this past year but the specialist that I saw for sleep problems when this was all diagnosed wasn't surprised at some of the memory issues I had been having given how severe it was; O2 saturation was dropping down to around 80% for a large portion of the night, and never above 90%. I was also having 0-30 seconds of REM sleep a night from what I was told in the sleep study. Both the terrible O2 and lack of REM sleep account for what was likely happening to my memory. Sleep is definitely a huge deal when it comes to memory.
There's probably different levels of recall. Like, raw acknowledgement of timestamps, i.e. this must have happened here while I was there. And then actual high level understanding and processing, like I was at this place and it was unusual for my daily routine, because I needed some papers signed, or whatever.
Probably in a normal functioning person they go lock step so you don't notice how they are different. But if your processes are out of sync, it could explain how they arrived at their feelings.
That happens more than you might think. Have you ever recalled something from your childhood and thought "oh, man, I haven't thought about that in years"?
Memory produces a lot of weird references and metadata. There are some significant experiences in my past where I'm pretty sure I don't remember the thing itself at all, I just remember remembering it. The vivid, multisensory experience of the event fades, and is replaced by the story I told myself when I thought about it later.
