When we have broken with our former selves, either in the way of worsening or bettering, we tend to project these further into the past.
It is only when the sting of the recollection is removed, when, for example, the calling up of the image of a lost friend is no longer accompanied with the bitterness of futile longing, that a healthy mind ventures to nourish recollections of such remote events and to view these as part of its recent experiences.

In this case the mnemonic image becomes transformed into a kind of present emotional possession, an element of that idealized and sublimated portion of our experience with which all imaginative persons fill up the emptiness of their actual lives, and to which the poet is wont to give an objective embodiment in his verse.
_Distortions of Memory._ It is now time to pass to the second group of illusions of memory, which, according to the analogy of visual errors, may be called atmospheric illusions.

Here the degree of error is greater than in the case of illusions of time-perspective, since the very nature of the events or circumstances is misconceived.

We do not recall the event as it happened, but see it in part only, and obscured, or bent and distorted as by a process of refraction.

Indeed, this transformation of the past does closely correspond with the transformation of a visible object effected by intervening media.