In therapy, a man's vivid memory of a happy family holiday is explored, and it emerges that the holiday did happen, but one detail he consistently recalls — that his older brother was present and cheerful throughout — turns out to be inaccurate, since his brother was, in fact, absent for most of the trip following a family argument. Before revealing the answer: what does this pattern suggest?

This pattern is consistent with a screen memory: a genuine event, the holiday, underlies the memory, but one specific element — his brother's cheerful presence — has been substituted, plausibly protecting him from a more painful truth about the family argument and his brother's absence. The rest of the memory being accurate is itself informative, since it is exactly this mixture of real and substituted material, rather than a wholesale fabrication, that characterises a screen memory as opposed to a false memory of an event that never happened at all.