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MUSEUM BULLETIN NO. 2. 
upon himself the shape of the animal itself. This is the formula 
that appears over and over again, in all these dream-experiences, 
and is unquestionably transmitted from one generation to 
another. How this is transmitted would be an interesting 
thing to determine, but in the present state of our knowledge, 
I am afraid all that can be done is to offer a few hypothetical 
explanations. It is this that we shall in the main attempt 
to do. 
What opportunity does a boy of say eleven years or there- 
abouts have ot learning this dream-experience formula? That 
he would have the slightest opportunity of himself hearing an 
older person recount his dream-experience is quite unlikely, 
for it seems in olden times to have been customary to recount it 
only on one's sick bed and then to an older person. There is 
thus left only one means whereby he could obtain the desired 
information and that is through the system of instruction to 
which it was customary to subject all children from the age of 
five or six to the age of puberty and which consisted almost 
exclusively in directions concerning the actions necessary to 
take in order to ensure a happy and successful life. One of 
the most insistent prayers in this instruction is that without a 
guardian-spirit (manito) no individual could possibly surmount 
the crises in his life. But the main question to decide is, does the 
youth in this instruction obtain any detailed information about 
the dream-experience formula itself ? I believe he does not. 
All that he is taught is to expect a dream-experience. The 
main object, I should say, is to obtain the religious thrill; the 
form that it assumes may be vague except for the outstanding 
fact that a manito has appeared to him. How then are we to 
account for the stability of the formal element? This, I believe, 
may be accounted for by two facts, first, that a minute control is 
exercised by the parents or grandparents, as the case may be, 
over the faster, and secondly, that the form in which a dream- 
experience is told does not represent that of the boy of eleven 
but that of a mature man. It is this latter fact, that we never 
obtain the experience of the youth, immediately after his fasting, 
that makes the question of the exact mechanism of transmission 
so difficult. 
