She answered in her childish way, “I think I do not dream.”  She went to sleep immediately and again repeated the poem, word for word, without a single mistake.  Again I awakened her with the words, “Now tell me what you have been dreaming.”  And again she answered, “I think I do not dream.”  I said:  “But yes; don’t you remember you were just saying, ’When the time comes for me to go’?” (the last line of the poem).  “Oh, yes,” she said, “I was seeing it, and I think I’ll not go to sleep again.  It tires me so to see it.”

While she was awake she had no recollection of having seen the poem and was indeed in her dissociated state quite incapable of understanding its meaning.  Asleep, she saw every word as plainly as if the page had been before her eyes.

The distorted pictures of dreams are always made of the material which past experiences have furnished and which have in many cases been dropped out of consciousness for years only to rise out of their long oblivion when the conscious mind has been put to sleep.

=Unearthing Old Experiences.= However, psychology does not have to wait for buried memories to come forth of their own free will.  It has a number of successful ways of summoning them from their hiding-place and helping them across the line into consciousness.  In the hands of skilled investigators and therapeutists, hypnosis, hypnoidization, automatic writing, crystal-gazing, abstraction, free association, word-association, and interpretation of dreams have all been repeatedly successful in bringing to light memories which apparently have been for many years completely blotted out of mind.  As we become better acquainted with these technical devices we shall find that there are four kinds of experiences whose records are carefully stored away in our minds.  Some were always so far from the center of our attention that we could swear they never had been ours; others, although once present in consciousness, were so trivial and unimportant that it seems ridiculous to suppose them conserved; others never came into our waking minds at all and entered our lives only in special states, such as sleep or delirium or dreams.  All these we should expect to forget; the astonishing thing is that they ever were conserved.  But there is a fourth class that is different.  It is made up of experiences that were so vital, so emotional, so closely woven into the fiber of our being that it seems impossible that they ever could be forgotten.  Let us look at a few examples of records of all these four kinds of experiences, examples chosen from hundreds of their kind as illustrations of the all-embracing character of buried memories.[21]

[Footnote 21:  For further examples see Prince, The Unconscious; Prince, The Dissociation of a Personality, and Hudson, The Law of Psychic Phenomena.]