It looks as though we could be sure of recalling only recent events with any degree of accuracy and completeness.

As soon as they recede at any considerable distance from us, they are subject to a sort of atmospheric effect.

Much grows indistinct and drops altogether out of sight, and what is still seen often takes a new and grotesquely unlike shape.

More than this, the play of fancy, like the action of some refracting medium, bends and distorts the outlines of memory's objects, making them wholly unlike the originals.
_Hallucinations of Memory._ We will now go on to the third class of mnemonic error, which I have called the spectra of memory, where there is not simply a transformation of the past event, but a complete imaginative creation of it.

This class of error corresponds, as I have observed, to an hallucination in the region of sense-perception.