The Mineral argus., 1884-10-02
Dreams and Drsamsr..

AAo anu
from HArper's Weekly.
Dreams are in the main refar,o5
the savage either to the entrance ;nto
him OF some outside spirit as among tba
Feejeeans, who believe that the sn;,;t
Of a living man will leave the BODY 70
trouble sleeping folk-or to the real
doings of himself. When the Green
lander dreams ofhunting, or fishing. O,
counting, he believes that the soul op;,.
the body; the Dyaks of Boraeo tbinL
that during sleep the soul sometimes
remains In the body or travels far away
being endowed, whether present or al
sent, with conditions which in wallioo
moments are lacking. Wherever We
fnd a low state of mental development
the like belief exists. In MI. ThurDim's
elaborate work on the Indians of Guiana
we have corroborative evidence the
more valuable because of its freshness
He tells us that the dreams which come
20 the Indian are to him as real as anv
Of the events of his waking life. 10
aim dream acts and waking acts differ
only in one respect, namely, that the for.
mer are done only by the spirit, the lat
ter are done by the spirit in its BODY.
Seeing other men asleep and afterward
hearing from them the things which
they suppose themselves to have done
when asleep, the Indian has no difficult
" in reconciling that which he hears
with the fact that the bodies of the
sleepers were IN his sight ard motion
less throughout the time of supposed
action, because he never questions that
the spirits, leaving the sleepers, played
their part in dream adventures.
In the Scandinavian Vatnsd@la Saga
there is a curious account OF three Firms
who were shut up in a hut three nights,
and ordered by Ingimund, a Norwegian
chief, to visit Iceland and inform him Of
the line of the country where he was to
settle. Their bodies became rigid, and
they sent their SOM on their errand,
and on their awaking, at the end Of
three days, gave an accurate account Of
the Vatnsdal, in which Ingimund ulti-
mately dwelt. No wonder that in med
laval times, when witches swept the air
and harried the cattle, s~wooning and
other forms of insenslbility were adj
duced in support of the theory of soul
absence, or that we find among savages
as the Tejads of the Luzon Islands
objections to waking a sleeper, lest the
soul happens to be out of the body. As
= corollary to this belief in soul alb
sence, fear arises lest it be prolonged to
The peril of the owner, and hence a
rough-and-ready theory of the cause OF
disease is framed, for savages rarely
die in their beds. That disease
is a arrangement of functions, in
terrupting their natural action, and car
rying attendant pain as its indication,
could not enter the head of the uncivil-
lied; and, indeed, among ourselves a
cold or fever is commonly thought of as
an entity in the body which has stolen
in, and, having been caught, must be
somehow expelled. With the universal
primitive belief in spiritual agencies
everywhere inhaled with the breath or
swallowed with the food or drink, all
diseases were regarded as their work,
whether, as remarked above, through
undue absence of the rightful spirit or
subtle entrance of some hostile n
If these be the causes to which sickness
es are due, obviously the only cure is to
get rid of them, and hence the sorcerer
of the medicine-man find their services
n request in casting out the demon by
force, or enticing him by cajolery, or in
bringing back the truant soul.