After what has been said respecting the conditions of such error in the case of memory, a very few words will suffice here.
It is clear, then, in the first place, that the mind will tend to shorten any period of future time, and so to antedate, so to speak, a given event, in so far as the imagination is able clearly and easily to run over its probable experiences.

From this it follows that repeated forecastings of series of events, by facilitating the imaginative process, tend to beget an illusory appearance of contraction in the time anticipated.

Moreover, since in anticipation so much of each division of the future time-line is unknown, it is obviously easy for the expectant imagination to skip over long intervals, and so to bring together widely remote events.
In addition to this general error, there are more special errors.

As in the case of recollection, vividness of mental image suggests propinquity; and accordingly, all vivid anticipations, to whatever cause the vividness may be owing, whether to powerful suggestion on the part of external objects, to verbal suggestion, or to spontaneous imagination and feeling, are apt to represent their objects as too near.
It follows that an event intensely longed for, in so far as the imagination is busy in representing it, will seem to approach the present.

At the same time, as we have seen, an event much longed for commonly appears to be a great while coming, the explanation being that there is a continually renewed contradiction between anticipation and perception.