[255] See, e.g., as regards the American Indians, Thornton Parker in the Open Court, May 1901.
[256] Leviathan, part I. ch. ii.
[257] Laistner, Das Rätsel der Sphinx, 1889, vol. 1. p. xiii. While Laistner was chiefly concerned with the exploration of the religious myths, he pointed out that epics and fairy-tales (Amor and Psyche, the stories of the Nibelung and Baldur, etc.) may be similarly explained. It seems probable that his investigations received a stimulus in the earlier experiments of J. Boerner (Das Alpdrücken, 1855) on the production of nightmare. Laistner has had many followers, notable C. Ruths (Experimental-Untersuchungen über Musikphantome, 1898), who argues (pp. 415-46) that the old Greek myths had their chief root in dream phenomena, in delirium, and in the visions aroused in some persons by hearing music, while he considers that many fabulous monsters and dragons have arisen from the combinations seen in dreams. We know that the Greeks, who were such great myth-makers, much occupied themselves in lying in wait for dreams, and in oneiromancy and necromancy (e.g., Bouché-Leclercq, Histoire de la Divination dans l'Antiquité, vol. 1. Bk. ii. ch. i. pp. 277-329). In this way alone it is doubtless true that, as Jewell says, 'dreams have had a great effect upon the history of the world.'
[258] For evidence regarding the high esteem in which many of the greatest Greek and Latin Fathers held dreams as divine revelations, see e.g., Sully, Art. 'Dreams,' Encyclopædia Britannica.
[259] There is still a natural tendency in the uninstructed mind to identify spontaneous visual phenomena with Heaven. 'When I gets to bed,' said an aged and superannuated dustman to Vanderkiste (The Dens of London, p. 14), 'I says my prayers, and I puts my hands afore my eyes—so [covering his face with his hands]; well, I sees such beautiful things, sparkles like, all afloating about, and I wished to ax yer, sir, if that ain't a something of Heaven, sir.'
[260] This was the only traceable element in the dream. The dreamer was accustomed to look at her watch on awaking in the morning, and, if it was seven or later, not to go to sleep again.
[261] Freud, 'Der Dichter und das Phantasieren' (1908), in second series of his Sammlung Kleiner Schriften zur Neurosenlehre; K. Abraham, Traum und Mythus (1909); and O. Rank, Der Mythus von der Geburt des Helden (1909), both published in the Schriften zur angewandten Seelenkunde, edited by Freud.
[262] Synesius refers to conversations with sheep in dreams, and he was probably the first to suggest that such dream phenomena may be the origin of fables in which animals speak. The dog and the cat, as we should expect, seem most frequently to speak in the dreams of civilised people. Thus I dreamed that I had a conversation with a cat who spoke with fair clearness and sense, though the whole of her sentences were not intelligible. I was not surprised at this relative lack of intelligibility, but neither was I surprised at her speaking at all. I have also encountered a talking parrot whose speech was more relevant than that of most talking parrots; this somewhat surprised me. In legends a wider range of animals are able to speak, no doubt because the primitive legend-makers were familiar with a wider range of animal life. How natural it is to the uninstructed mind to treat animals like human beings is well shown by the experiences of Helen Keller, the blind deaf-mute, who writes (The World I Live in, p. 147): 'After my education began, the world which came within my reach was all alive.... It was two years before I could be made to believe that my dogs did not understand what I said, and I always apologised to them when I ran into or stepped on them.'
[263] Journal of Mental Science, January 1909, p. 16.
[264] 'Images and thoughts,' he said, 'possess a power in and of themselves independent of that act of the judgment or understanding by which we affirm or deny the existence of a reality correspondent to them. Such is the ordinary state of the mind in dreams.... Add to this a voluntary lending of the will to this suspension of one of its own operations, and you have the true theory of stage illusion.'