most dreams leave but a slight impression on the mind even of the dreamer; and the memory of them is usually very vague and elusive. There is a serious risk, therefore, that when the partial correspondence of a dream with some external event comes to be known, the details of the indefinite picture preserved in the memory may be filled in to suit the facts—a process, it may be added, which implies no want of honesty on the part of the narrator; most of us probably "improve" our dreams unconsciously even on the first telling. Again the indefiniteness of dream memories comes partly from the fact, as already said, that the original impressions are in most cases weak; partly from the circumstance that the dream, unlike a vision seen with the eyes open, has no relations either in time or space, and forms no part in an associated chain of memories. This last objection does not, of course, apply to dreams which occur in a brief sleep in the daytime; and it is worthy of note that we have in our collection several remarkable coincidental dreams, of unusual vividness, which have occurred in such brief moments of slumber snatched from the waking hours.
From all this it follows that only those dreams are worthy of record in this connection which were noted down before their correspondence with the event was known, or which were at least told to some one else beforehand. In any case, in a dreamstory, the interval between its occurrence and the committal of it to writing should be of the briefest.
