Indeed, and it's important to note that and be aware of lines and crossing them. But actually, when I made that comment you led this article off with, I wasn't so much talking about embellishment as a "signal to noise" problem.

By that I mean, the process of telling a story can lay down fresh memories over old ones, over time leading to problems recalling the primary memories.

Let me tell you a story; let me relate an important, formative experience that happened when I was 18. I've only told this story once, when I was 23 or 24, though I did once mine part of it for a scene in a novel.

So:

I'm lying in a cramped, narrow bed, drifting in and out of sleep, periods of awareness mingling with dreaminess, to the point I'm not consciously distinguishing between the two states.

I am delightfully warm. A soft fragrance is drifting up from a furnace-hot body beside me. In a period of wakefulness (probably), I realize my hand is cupping his soft, cotton-clad flesh. I don't think of it as his butt, because I don't put words to my sensory experiences, but it's his butt, one cheek that I've been lightly clasping for I don't know how long.

As periods of awareness begin to win out over periods of dreaming, other senses begin to dominate.

It's very dark in his bedroom, but a casement window positioned just above his head is beginning to glow, ever so faintly, with a rose-colored hint of morning.

Birds are singing, gradually becoming louder.

Their song filling me with yearning melancholy. I press in closer to him, molding my body into his sleeping curves. He makes a contented noise and pushes back into me.

I pray for time to stop. I wish this beautiful moment will never end.

I remember, in a snap, that once the sun has fully risen we will get out of bed. We will probably kiss, but our morning breath will carry bitter notes that do not exist is this sweet, fragrant moment.

I remember that his mom will prepare breakfast for us, that she's already asked me what my favorites are.

I remember that I will throw my bag into my car and set out on a long drive. I remember that the chances are good that I will never see him again — at least not until we are each quite different people.

I feel tired because we seized the moment the night before, expressing our love with words, tiny caresses, and much more.

The night lasted forever, but now it is ending, because I cannot stop time. But I can hold onto the beauty, feel the warmth, hear the birds, see that rosy glow. Feel his velvet skin, bask in the certainy that he loves me as I love him.

...

There, that's a powerful memory I've long cherished. I could close my eyes and return to those sensations as I decided to start telling this story. I don't know exactly how accurate my memories are, but I figure they're pretty close. At least the sensory parts.

But now I've put it into words, my sensory memories are less powerful than the words, less fresh. The words are more what I remember now, because I worked to create them, perhaps, or because that's just a common human memory phenomenon. I don't know.

It's funny, when I wrote some of those senses into a novel passage, they didn't seem to attenuate my real memories. Because they were about somebody else who was real in my head, the character I invented.

But just now, telling this story for the first time in decades, have I created a signal to noise problem the will partially overwrite my direct sensory memories? Based on my personal experience with memory, I think the chances are pretty good.

That's what I meant in my original comment, but it's hard to describe, exactly, and others might not experience memory precisely the way I do, of course.