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_.]

=Out of the Corners of Our Eyes.= In the first place, we are much
more observing than we imagine. We may be so interested in our own
thoughts that details of our environment are entirely lost on the
conscious mind, but the subconscious has its eyes open, and its ears.
People in hypnosis have been known to repeat verbatim whole passages
from newspapers which they had never consciously read. While they were
busy with one column, their wide-awake subconscious was devouring the
next one, and remembering it. Prince relates the story of a young