Migratory consciousness; migratory souls?

What's your earliest memory – the first thing you can remember remembering? 

And why don't we remember the first months of our lives? 

Were we indeed conscious in our first months?

My earliest memory is a memory of a memory. It would be from some time early in 1959, I guess. 

My father, developed and printed his own black-and-white photographs in a makeshift darkroom (our kitchen with blackout blinds over the window) right through until the end of the 1960s. One evening, he made a set of prints from Christmas 1958. I am kneeling on a chair next to our Christmas tree, decorated with lights, baubles and tinsel. I am wearing a woollen jumper knitted by my mother. I have a small scab on my forehead/temple, about the size of a thumbnail. There are presents under the tree. 

On seeing the photograph, I remembered that moment clearly. I remembered that scab, and the bump that it resulted from. And I remember having quite a sophisticated thought; as I looked back at photos from the earliest weeks and months of my life on the previous pages of the photo album, I was aware that I had no memories of myself from those times. Yet when I looked at the photo of myself by the Christmas tree, I recalled experiencing that moment, living it, being aware.

And that was the first memory I can remember*; the excitement of Christmas impending. I would have been around 14-and-half months old at the time. I had precise recollection of the moment captured in the photograph, and the sense of self that associated my consciousness with the little fellow portrayed in it.

When does consciousness slip into this house? It felt fully formed by that age; but was it fully formed earlier? If so, when? And if so, why no earlier memories? 

If we work on the assumption that consciousness is the underlying substrate of reality, the fundamental property of the universe, from which spacetime and matter/energy derive, and that our biological bodies are containers of our immortal souls, which evolve over the aeons – at what point did my consciousness and my body become one? At conception? At the 'quickening'? At birth? Or some time during that first year of my body's life, that time from which we have no memories?

What brings a soul to a body? I had an intuition yesterday while walking through snowy fields. Could it be... music? I started thinking about my earliest musical memories. We had a radio, which my parents had bought shortly after getting married. It stood in the back room, and my mother would have it on for much of the day as she went about the housework. Central to this was Housewives' Choice and Music While You Work, the signature tunes to both which are instantly familiar to anyone around in the UK at that time.

Below: my parents' radio, bought at Barker's of Kensington department store. Screenshot from the Bluebells' Young at Heart video (at 0:41).

This fact makes it nice and easy in our days of AI to track down typical BBC Light Programme playlists with the music I'd have listened to as a very small child. Now, whilst Housewives Choice played records, Music While You Work presented live music played by dance bands (union musicians). So whether discs originally cut by Count Basie, Glen Miller, Duke Ellington or Tommy Dorsey – or live covers thereof – I would have been exposed to a great many numbers from these bands. Tunes from the 1940s were as close to my early years as tunes from the 2010s are to today.

Count Basie and his Orchestra entered the Capitol Records recording studios in New York City on 21 October 1957, just over a fortnight after I was born, to record an album now known as The Atomic Mr. Basie. The first track, The Kid from Red Bank, as well as several other tracks (Flight of the Foo Birds, Whirlybird and Splanky) have resonated strongly with me since I bought the album in the early 1980s, especially on snowy days under clear blue skies. How, why, I don't wish to speculate. I just feel a strong connection here.

[*But then there are what I'd term the 'birth-canal dreams', one of the most common tropes in my dreambook – squeezing through a narrow passage. Do these dreams prove a memory connection with birth?] 

This time last year:
Sunshine reminds me of spring
[not a whisper of spring right now! It's -8.7°C outside at the moment]

This time two years ago:
Winter's wildness

This time five years ago:
Snow turns to slush

This time six years ago:
London in its legal finery

This time seven years ago:
Winter walk through the Las Kabacki

This time nine years ago:

1967: The Year The World Started Turning To Colour

This time 12 years ago:
Rain on a freezing day (-7C)

This time 13 years ago:
Jeziorki in the snow

This time 15 years ago:
Winter's slight return

This time 16 years ago:
Unacceptable

This time 17 years ago:
Pieniny in winter

This time 18 years ago:
Wetlands in a wet winter