166 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 175 



dreams and power. This applies also to Hikye:t" and to Kwathany Hi:wa 

 (lizard heart) as well as to Kapel Tcukye:va. No matter how much money you 

 offer them, they don't want to say anything about their powers." 



Acatc's statement (1938). — Hiwey lak seems to be connected with menstrual 

 troubles and with the pseudocyesis which such troubles cause. Menstrual blood 

 is bad blood, which is expelled from the body. Some women bleed little, how- 

 ever, because they are sick; such women are eventually killed by this disease. 

 Some of them do not get with child even from men who already fathered other 

 children. Something is wrong with their blood and with their stomach, and is 

 likely to kill them. They dream of having children and then their blood forms 

 some sort of "child" inside of them. That is one cause of hiwey lak. 



Hiioey lak dreams. — Y/ith the exception of dreams of incest with 

 living relatives (Case 42), all hiwey lak dreams supposedly con- 

 cern the dead, either directly or indirectly. An important exception 

 to the rule that such dreams cause illness is the belief that during the 

 four nights following death the soul of the deceased — which is not 

 quite a ghost as yet — revisits its old haunts, and may even have inter- 

 course with the surviving spouse, without harm to the latter. The 

 belief that witches m.ay have erotic dreams about their victims — whose 

 souls they temporarily prevent from going to the land of the dead, i.e., 

 from becoming real ghosts (Devereux, 1937 c) — without becoming ill 

 is, in a sense, simply a more complex expression of the basic belief 

 that only relations with fully fledged ghosts, already residing in the 

 land of the dead, can cause disease. 



The chaotic variety of dreams cited in the preceding accounts 

 actually falls into a very few, closely interrelated categories: 



(i) Breams restoring the status quo ante. — These include dreams of the house 

 of one's youth, of the rites one underwent at puberty, of the actions one per- 

 formed and the roads one traveled while one's relatives were still alive ; dreams 

 of female (i.e., maternal) regalia and possessions, which recall the future 

 transvestites' preoccupation with female regalia ; activity dreams which cause 

 one to feel tired first in dream and then also on awakening, etc. This latter 

 type of dream suggests a nexus betR^een hiwey lak and the activity psychoses 

 (pt. 2, pp. 46-.56). 



(2) Dreams accepting the loss. — Dreams of the old home, which eppears 

 battered and abandoned in dream, as it now is also in reality. 



(S) Social interaction with ghosts. — One is visited by, or else visits, the 

 ghosts of one's relatives, who seek to persuade one to join them in the land of 

 the dead. Sometimes the ghost rises from the corpse and engages the dreamer 

 in conversation. At other times one engages in various routine activities with 

 the ghosts of one's relatives. 



(Jf) Food. — The ghosts prepare aboriginal food for the dreamer, who then 

 partakes of it and thereafter has no appetite for human food. One may dream 



" This shaman did, eventually, consent to an interview. However, his extremely con- 

 fused statements and his air of embarrassed vigilance Indicated that Ahma Huma :re was 

 right In saying that he would be afraid to speak of his powers (pt. 1, pp. 9-11). 



"The implications of this remark are: (1) Ahma Huma :re talked to me not simply 

 for pay, but chiefly from friendship, and (2) unlike the shamans just mentioned, he was 

 not a witch who is afraid of revealing the nature of his powers. 



