Evidently our brain contains something akin both to a photographic
plate and a phonographic cylinder, and many other things of the same
kind not yet discovered; not a sight or a sound or a smell is lost; not
a taste or a feeling or an emotion. Unconscious memory records them all,
without our even heeding what goes on around us beyond the things that
attract our immediate interest or attention.
Thus night after night I saw reacted before me scenes not only fairly
remembered, but scenes utterly forgotten, and yet as unmistakably true
as the remembered ones, and all bathed in that ineffable light, the
light of other days--the light that never was on sea or land, and yet
the light of absolute truth.
How it transcends in value as well as in beauty the garish light of
common day, by which poor humanity has hitherto been content to live and
die, disdaining through lack of knowledge the shadow for the substance,
the spirit for the matter! I verified the truth of these sleeping
experiences in every detail: old family letters I had preserved, and
which I studied on awaking, confirmed what I had seen and heard in my
dream; old stories explained themselves. It was all by-gone truth,
garnered in some remote corner of the brain, and brought out of the dim
past as I willed, and made actual once more.
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