arge extent, answerable
for the sense of familiarity that we sometimes experience in visiting a
new locality or in seeing a new face. If, as we have found some of the
best authorities saying, we are, when asleep, always dreaming more or
less distinctly, and if, as we know, dreaming is a continual process of
transformation of our waking impressions in new combinations, it is not
surprising that our dreams should sometimes take the form of forecasts
of our waking life, and that consequently objects and scenes of this
life never before seen should now and again wear a familiar look.

That some instances of this puzzling sense of familiarity can be
explained in this way is proved. Thus, Paul Radestock, in the work
_Schlaf und Traum_, already quoted, tells us: "When I have been taking a
walk, with my thoughts quite unfettered, the idea has often occurred to
me that I had seen, heard, or thought of this or that thing once before,
without being able to recall when, where, and in what circumstances.
This happened at the time when, with a view to the publication of the
present work, I was in the habit of keeping an exact record of my
dreams. Consequently, I was able to turn to this after these
impressions, and on doing so I generally found the conjecture confirmed
that I had previously dreamt something like it." Scientific inquiry is
often said to destroy all beautiful thoughts about nature and life; but
while it destroys it creates. Is it not almost a romantic idea that just
as our waking life images itself in our dreams, so our dream-life may
send back some of its shadowy phantoms into our prosaic every-day world,
touching this with something of its own weird beauty?

Not only may dreams beget these momentary illusions of memory, they may
give rise to something like permanent illusions. If a dream serves to
connect a certain idea with a place or person, and subsequent experience
does not tend to correct this, we may keep the belief that we have
actually witnessed the event. And we may naturally expect that this
result will occur most frequently in the case of those who habitually
dream vividly, as young children.

It seems to me that many of the quaint fancies which children get into
their heads about things they hear of arise in this way. I know a person
who, when a child, got the notion that when his baby-brother was weaned,
he was taken up on a grassy hill and tossed about. He had a vivid idea
of having seen this curious