This reminded me a bit of a Stephen King interview I just heard on the Terry Gross show in which King talks about what it is that scares him now as opposed to when he was a kid:

"So here's the movie that scared me the most in the last 12 or 13 years: The movie opens with a woman in late middle age, sitting at a table and writing a story, and the story goes something like, 'Then the branches creaked in the ...' and she stops and she says to her husband, 'What are those things? I can't think of them. They're in the backyard and they're very tall and birds land on the branches.' And he says, 'Why, Iris, those are trees,' and she says, 'Yes, how silly of me,' and she writes the word and the movie starts. And that's Iris Murdoch and she's suffering the onset of Alzheimer's disease. That's the boogeyman in the closet now. ... I'm afraid of losing my mind."

Losing ones mind is terrifying as an adult. But I realize this is not really what you are talking about, even young people tend to have revisionist versions of actual events. I sort of think this is a self-preservationist method to staying sane. Things can be awful, remembering them as amazing sure helps.

We recently took my daughter to a baseball game on a Saturday night. In the summer they have fireworks at the end of the game and we really talked this up to her. She was very excited and kept saying, "now fireworks?" Eventually the fireworks came and they scared the bajeesus out of her. Loud, way too close and constant. She cowered in my arms as my wife placed her hands over her ears.

The next day all my daughter did was brag to everyone about the fireworks she saw and how much she liked them. To her, it sure beat the reality.