There's a vague resemblance only. "Londonderry Air" may be a distant relative, but I doubt that it could have "evolved from" or could have been a "version of" "The Young Man's Dream." The quite unresolvable questions are how much, if anything, did the collector "improve" the tune, and where the fiddler got it from. These are the sort of questions that fascinate some people and leave others cold. All we can say with certainty is that Bunting received the tune from Jane Ross before 1855, which makes it a genuine mid-19th century Irish melody. What little evidence there is suggests that it was not very widely known.
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