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 ceremony.