There are memories of sexual abuse as children or some other buried horror. And they go, maybe, to be hypnotized, hoping to get the details, and some of them go to court and, on the strength of the newly-recovered memory, try to get a conviction against the perpetrator. But our minds hold a dirty little secret, which I shall now expose. But our memories cannot yield up an accurate record of the past, no matter how real and graphic they seem. Memory is a kind of illusion, more like dreams that we had previously realized.
Dreams seem pretty convincing.
I woke up, got out of bed, showered and dressed and had breakfast. But I was asleep, and had to go through the whole routine all over again, for real. Primitive humans couldn't tell the difference between their dreams and reality. They would go to sleep at night and dream of fathers, mothers, grandparents and ancestors, and friends who had already died and concluded, as Otto Rank has it, concluded that they were still alive, as ghosts or spirits. They believed in what they saw, literally.