In much the same way children try to understand the movements of the sun and other heavenly bodies by help of the familiar movements of terrestrial objects. Thus the sun was thought by American children to fly, to be blown, perhaps like a soap-bubble or air-ball, and, by a child with a more mechanical turn, to roll, presumably as a hoop rolls, and so forth. Theological ideas, too, are pressed into the service of childish explanation, as when the disappearance of the sun is ascribed to God's pulling it up higher out of sight, to his taking it into heaven and putting it to bed, and the like.
The impressive phenomena of thunder and lightning give rise in the case of the child as in that of the Nature-man to some fine myth-making. The American children, as already observed, have different mechanical illustrations for describing the supernatural operation here, thunder being thought of as the noise made by God when groaning, when walking heavily on the floor of heaven, when he has coals "run in"—ideas which show how naïvely the child-mind humanises the Deity, making him a respectable citizen with a house and a coal-cellar. In like manner the lightning is attributed to God's lighting the gas, or striking many matches at once. By a similar use of familiar household operations God is supposed to cause rain by turning on a tap, or by letting it down from a cistern by a hose, or, better, by passing it through a sieve or a dipper with holes.[7]
Throughout the whole region of these mysterious phenomena we have illustrations of the tendency to regard what takes place as designed for us poor mortals. Thus one of the American children referred to said charmingly that the moon comes round when people forget to light the lamps. The little girl of whom Mr. Canton writes thought "the wind and the rain and the moon 'walking' came out to see her, and the flowers woke up with the same laudable object". When frightened by the crash of the thunder a child instinctively thinks that it is all done to vex his little soul. An earthquake may be thought of as a kind of wonder show, specially got up for the admiration of a sufficient body of spectators. Two children, D. and K., aged ten and five respectively, lived in a small American town. D., who was reading about an earthquake, addressed his mother thus: "Oh, isn't it dreadful, mamma? Do you suppose we will ever have one here?" K., intervening with the characteristic impulse of the young child to correct his elders, answered: "Why, no, D., they don't have earthquakes in little towns like this". Later on Nature's arrangements are criticised from the same point of view. A girl of seven, going back to the interesting question of babies, remarked to her mother: "Wouldn't it be convenient if you laid an egg, and then if you changed your mind you needn't hatch it?"
Dreams.
Children are apt to have their own thoughts about the strange semblances of objects which sometimes present themselves to their eyes, more particularly the "spectra" which we see after looking at the sun or when the circulation of the retina is disturbed. One little fellow spun quite a romance about the spectra he used to see when poorly, saying that they were angels, and that they went into his toy-basket and played with his toys.
The most common form of such illusory appearance is, of course, the dream, and I believe that children dwell much on the mystery of dreaming. The simpler kind of child, like the savage, is disposed to take his dreams for sensible realities. A boy in an elementary school in London, aged five years, said one day: "Teacher, I saw an old woman one night against my bed". Another child, a little girl in the same school, told her mother that she had seen a funeral last night, and on being asked, "Where?" answered quaintly, "I saw it in my pillow". A little boy whom I know once asked his mother not to put him to bed in a certain room, "because there were so many dreams in the room".
Yet children who reflect soon find out that dream-objects do not belong to the common world, in the sights of which we all partake. Another theory has then to be found. I believe that many children, especially those who, being imaginative when awake, make their fairy-stories and their own romancings very real to themselves, and who, as a result of this, are wont to return to them in their dreams, are inclined to identify dreamland and fairyland. If they want to see their "fairies" by day they will shut their eyes; and so the idea may naturally enough occur to them that when closing their eyes for sleep they are going to see the beloved fairies again, and for a longer time. Other ideas about dreams also occur among children. A gentleman tells me that when a child he used to think that dreaming, though different from actual seeing, was yet more than having one's own individual fancies; on dreaming, for example, that he had met certain people he supposed that each of these must have had a dream in which he had met him. This, it may be remembered, is very much the fanciful idea of dreaming which Mr. Du Maurier works out in his pretty story Peter Ibbetson.
There is some evidence to show that a thoughtful child, when he begins to grasp the truth that dreams are only unreal phantasms, becomes confused, and wonders whether the things too which we see when waking are not unreal. Here is a quaint example of this transference of childish doubt from dreamland to the every-day world. A little boy five years old asked his teacher: "Wouldn't it be funny if we were dreaming?" and being satisfied by the reply elicited that it would be funny, he continued more explicitly: "Supposing every one in the whole world were dreaming, wouldn't that be funny? They might be, mightn't they?" Receiving a slightly encouraging, "Perhaps they might," he wound up his argument in this fashion: "Yes, but I don't think we are—I'm sure we are not. Perhaps we should wake up and find every one gone away." This is dark enough, but suggests, I think, that doubt as to the bright beautiful forms seen in sleep is casting its shadow on the real world, on the precious certainty of the presence of those we love. A little girl about six and a half years old being instructed by her father as to the making of the world remarked: "Perhaps the world's a fancy". The doubt in this case too was, one may conjecture, led up to by the loss of faith in dreamland.