The more I thought it over, the more certain it appeared as part of
my own experience. Putting two and two together, I made sure in my
own mind this was a genuine recollection of my life in Australia. I
was born there, I knew: that I had learned from everybody. But I
could distinctly remember having LIVED there now. It came back to me
as memory. The dream had reinstated it.

And it was the sight of the photograph that had produced the dream.
This was curious, very. A weird idea came across me. Had I begun, in
all past efforts to remember, at the wrong end? Instead of trying to
recollect the circumstances that immediately preceded the murder,
ought I to have set out by trying to reinstate my First Life,
chapter by chapter and verse by verse, from childhood upward? Ought
I to start by recalling as far as possible my very earliest
recollections in my previous existence, and then gradually work up
through all my subsequent history to the date of the murder?

The more I thought of it, the more convinced was I that that was the
right procedure.

It was certainly significant that this vague childish recollection
of something which might have happened when I was just about two
years old should be the very first thing to recur to my my memory.
Yet so appalled and alarmed was I by the weirdness of this sudden
apparition, looming up, as it were, all by itself in the depths of
my consciousness, that I hardly dared bring myself to think of
trying to recall any other scenes of that dead and past existence.
The picture rose like an exhalation, hanging unrelated in mid-air, a
mere mental mirage: and it terrified me so much, that I shrank