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 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.