harry potter - Can I view someone else's desires from the Mirror of Erised by looking at their memory of the Mirror in the Pensieve?

If one were to look in the Mirror of Erised while in someone else's memory (say the Pensieve or some device like Voldemort's diary) would you see your own desire, or the person whose memory it is?

How much of the Pensieve's 'memory bubble' content is the original user's, and how much is the viewer's?

Answer

Probably not

Every time that the pensieve is entered in the books, it is always in third-person. One sees as if they were in the room with the memory's owner, not as if they themselves were the memory's owner.

For example, Harry can understand parseltongue when he visits Bob Ogden's memory, despite the fact that Bob Ogden wasn't able to understand any of it.

Do the memories stored in a Pensieve reflect reality or the views of the person they belong to?

JKR: It’s reality. It’s important that I have got that across, because Slughorn gave Dumbledore this pathetic cut-and-paste memory. He didn't want to give the real thing, and he very obviously patched it up and cobbled it together. So, what you remember is accurate in the Pensieve.

So there are things in there that you haven't noticed personally, but you can go and see yourself?

JKR: Yes, and that's the magic of the Pensieve, that's what brings it alive. Otherwise it really would just be like a diary, wouldn’t it? Confined to what you remember. But the Pensieve recreates a moment for you, so you could go into your own memory and relive things that you didn't notice the time. It’s somewhere in your head, which I'm sure it is, in all of our brains. I'm sure if you could access it, things that you don't know you remember are all in there somewhere.

_{Anelli, Melissa and Emerson Spartz. "The Leaky Cauldron and Mugglenet interview Joanne Kathleen Rowling: Part Three," The Leaky Cauldron, 16 July 2005}

When one looks into the mirror of Erised, others in the room cannot see what they see. Likewise, people standing in the memory wouldn't be able to either.

Comments

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