ceremony. He has in vain tried to get an
explanation of this picturesque rendering of an incident of babyhood
from his friends, and has come to the conclusion that it was the result
of a dream. If, as seems probable, children's dreams thus give rise to
subsequent illusions of memory, the fact would throw a curious light on
some of the startling quasi-records of childish experience to be met
with in autobiographical literature.

Odd though it may at first appear, old age is said to resemble youth in
this confusion of dream-recollection with the memory of waking
experience. Dr. Carpenter[128] tells us of "a lady of advanced age
who ... continually dreams about passing events, and seems entirely unable
to distinguish between her dreaming and her waking experiences,
narrating the former with implicit belief in them, and giving directions
based on them." This confusion in the case of the old may possibly
arise not from an increase in the intensity of the dreams, but from a
decrease in the intensity of the waking impressions. As Sir Henry
Holland remarks,[129] in old age life approaches to the state of a
dream.

The other source of what may, by analogy with the hallucinations of
sense, be called the peripherally originating spectra of memory is
waking imagination. In certain morbid conditions of mind, and in the
case of the few healthy minds endowed with special imaginative force,
the products of this mental activity, may, as we saw when dealing with
illusions of perception, closely resemble dreams in their vividness and
apparent actuality. When this is the case, illusions of memory may arise
at once just as in the case of dreams. This will happen more easily when
the imagination has for some time been occupied with the same group of
ideal scenes, persons, or events. To Dickens, as is well known, his
fictitious characters were for the time realities, and after he had
finished his story their forms and their doings lingered with him,
assuming the aspect of personal recollections. So, too, the energetic
activity of imagination which accompanies a deep and absorbing sympathy
with another's painful experiences, may easily result in so vivid a
realization of all their details as to leave an after-sense of
_personal_ suffering. All highly sympathetic persons who have closely
accompanied beloved friends through a great sorrow have known something
of this subsequent feeling.

The close connection and continuity between normal and