ix.] POWER OF DREAMS. 215 



so very important a part in superstition in all ages, I 

 beg you to think a moment. Recollect your own 

 dreams during childhood ; and recollect again that the 

 savage is always a child. Recollect how difficult it was 

 for you in childhood, how difficult it must be always for 

 the savage, to decide whether dreams are phantasms or 

 realities. To the savage, I doubt not, the food he eats, 

 the foes he grapples with, in dreams, are as real as any 

 waking impressions. But, moreover, these dreams will 

 be very often, as children's dreams are wont to be, of a 

 painful and terrible kind. Perhaps they will be always 

 painful ; perhaps his dull brain will never dream, save 

 under the influence of indigestion, or hunger, or an 

 uncomfortable attitude. And so, in addition to his 

 waking experience of the terrors of nature, he will 

 have a whole dream-experience besides, of a still more 

 terrific kind. He walks by day past a black cavern 

 mouth, and thinks, with a shudder Something ugly 

 may live in that ugly hole : what if it j uinped out 

 upon me? He broods over the thought with the 

 intensity of a narrow and unoccupied mind; and a 

 few nights after, he has eaten but let us draw a veil 

 before the larder of a savage his chin is pinned down 

 on his chest, a slight congestion of the brain comes on ; 

 and behold he finds himself again at that cavern's 

 mouth, and something ugly does jump out upon him : 

 and the cavern is a haunted spot henceforth to him 

 and to all his tribe. It is in vain that his family tell 

 him that he has been lying asleep at home all the 

 while. He has the evidence of his senses to prove the 

 contrary. He must have got out of himself, and gone 

 into the woods. When we remember that certain wise 

 Greek philosophers could find no better explanation 



