194 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



turned to the subject. " He stood at the window at B , looking 



out at a sea mist thoughtfully, and said suddenly : ' Mamma, do 

 you remember I told you that I had seen angels ? Well, I want 

 now to say they were not angels, though I thought they were. I 

 have seen it often lately, I see it now : it is bright stars, small 

 bright stars moving by. I see it in the mist before that tree. I 

 see it oftenest in the misty days. . . . Perhaps by and by I shall 

 think it is something in my own eyes." Here we see a long and 

 painstaking attempt of a child's brain to read a meaning into the 

 " flying spots " which many of us know, though we hardly give 

 them a moment's attention. 



What are children's first thoughts about their dreams like ? I 

 have not been able to collect much evidence on this head. What 

 seems certain is that to the naive intelligence of the child these 

 counterfeits of ordinary sense-presentations are real external 

 things. The crudest manifestation of this thought-tendency is 

 seen in taking the dream apparition to be actually present in the 

 bedroom. A boy in an elementary school in London, aged five 

 years, said one day, " Teacher, I saw an old woman one night 

 against my bed." Another child, a little girl, in the same school, 

 told her mother that she had seen a funeral last night, and on be- 

 ing asked " Where ? " answered quaintly, " I saw it in my pil- 

 low." A little boy, whom I know, once asked his mother not to 

 put him to bed in a certain room " because there were so many 

 dreams in the room." In thus materializing the dream and local- 

 izing it in the actual surroundings, the child but reflects the 

 early thought of the race which starts from the supposition that 

 the man or animal which appears in a dream actually approaches 

 the sleeper. 



The Nature-man, as we know from Prof. Tylor's researches, 

 goes on to explain dreams by his theory of souls or " doubles " 

 ("animism"). Children do not often find their way to so subtle 

 a line of thought. Much more commonly they pass from the 

 first stage of naive acceptance of objects as present here and now 

 to the identification of dreamland with fairyland or the other 

 and invisible world. There is little doubt that the imaginative 

 child firmly believes in the existence of this invisible world, keeps 

 it carefully apart from this one, even though at times he may 



give it a definite locality in this e. g., in C 's case, in the wall of 



his bedroom. He gets access to it by shutting out the real world, 

 as when he closes his eyes tightly and " thinks." With such a 

 child dreams get taken up into the invisible world. Going to 

 sleep is now recognized as the surest way of passing into this 

 region. The varying color of his dreams, now bright and daz- 

 zling in their beauty, now black and terrifying, is explained by a 

 reference to the division of that fairy world into princes and good 



