myself for this, and before everything else I started out for Madonna dell' Arena. On the street leading to it, on my left, probably at the place where I had turned in 1895, I discovered the locality which I had so often seen in the dream, with its sandstone figures. It was in fact the entrance to a restaurant garden.
One of the sources from which the dream draws material for reproduction—material which in part is not recalled or employed in waking thought—is to be found in childhood. I shall merely cite some of the authors who have observed and emphasized this.
Hildebrandt35 (p. 23): "It has already been expressly admitted that the dream sometimes brings back to the mind with wonderful reproductive ability remote and even forgotten experiences from the earliest periods."
Strümpell66 (p. 40): "The subject becomes more interesting when we remember how the dream sometimes brings forth, as it were, from among the deepest and heaviest strata which later years have piled upon the earliest childhood experiences, the pictures of certain places, things, and persons, quite uninjured and with their original freshness. This is not limited merely to such impressions as have gained vivid consciousness during their origin or have become impressed with strong psychic validity, and then later return in the dream as actual reminiscences, causing pleasure to the awakened consciousness. On the contrary, the depths of the dream memory comprise also such pictures of persons, things, places, and early experiences as either possessed but little consciousness and no psychic value at all, or have long ago lost both, and therefore appear totally strange and unknown both in the dream and in the waking state, until their former origin is revealed."
Volkelt72 (p. 119): "It is essentially noteworthy how easily infantile and youthful reminiscences enter into the dream. What we have long ceased to think about, what has long since lost for us all importance, is constantly recalled by the dream."
The sway of the dream over the infantile material, which, as is well known, mostly occupies the gaps in the conscious memory, causes the origin of interesting hypermnestic dreams, a few of which I shall here report.
