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.