Devil’s Island enters the discussion as a remembered image folded into a dream: a man isolated on a steep rock in the sea evokes Dreyfus’s confinement there. Its significance lies in the way the image connects a distant, politically charged association with news recalled on the day before the dream.

The Island as a Dream Image

The dream presents a man standing on a steep rock in the middle of the sea, in the style of Böcklin. The associated source is Dreyfus on Devil’s Island, alongside news about relatives in England. The island is not described as a visited setting or given a broader physical portrait; it appears as the distant place condensed into the dream’s image of exposure and isolation.

Memory and the Dream-Day

The example supports the account’s claim that a dream stimulus belongs to the day immediately preceding the dream, even when the impression itself originated earlier. The writer argues that an event from two or three days before can seem to have prompted a dream, but closer examination may show that the earlier impression was recalled on the previous day. That intervening recollection connects the older event to the dream-day and supplies a recent occasion for its return.

A Link Between Distant Events and Recent Recollection

Devil’s Island therefore functions less as an independently narrated location than as one node in a chain of association: Dreyfus’s exile, news of relatives in England, and the dream’s sea-rock image. The passage’s emphasis is temporal and psychological. An impression need not be newly experienced to enter a dream, but, in this account, its recurrence in memory on the preceding day makes it part of the immediate material from which the dream is formed.