sciousness, 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
woman who unconsciously "took in" the details of a friend's
appearance:

I asked B.C.A. (without warning and after having covered her
eyes) to describe the dress of a friend who was present and with
whom she had been conversing perhaps some twenty minutes. She was
unable to do so beyond saying that he wore dark clothes. I then
found that I myself was unable to give a more detailed
description of his dress, although we had lunched and been
together about two hours. B.C.A. was then asked to write a
description automatically. Her hand wrote as follows (she was
unaware that her hand was writing):

"He has on a dark greenish gray suit, a stripe in it--little
rough stripe; black bow cravat; shirt with three little stripes
in it; black laced shoes; false teeth; one finger gone; three
buttons on his coat."

The written description was absolutely correct. The stripes in
the coat were almost invisible. I had not noticed
his teeth or the