Recollect how difficult it was for you in
childhood, how difficult it must be always for the savage, to decide
whether dreams are phantasms or realities. To the savage, I doubt
not, the food he eats, the foes he grapples with, in dreams, are as
real as any waking impressions. But, moreover, these dreams will be
very often, as children's dreams are wont to be, of a painful and
terrible kind. Perhaps they will be always painful; perhaps his
dull brain will never dream, save under the influence of
indigestion, or hunger, or an uncomfortable attitude. And so, in
addition to his waking experience of the terrors of nature, he will
have a whole dream-experience besides, of a still more terrific
kind. He walks by day past a black cavern mouth, and thinks, with a
shudder--Something ugly may live in that ugly hole: what if it
jumped out upon me? He broods over the thought with the intensity
of a narrow and unoccupied mind; and a few nights after, he has
eaten--but let us draw a veil before the larder of a savage--his
chin is pinned down on his chest, a slight congestion of the brain
comes on; and behold he finds himself again at that cavern's mouth,
and something ugly does jump out upon him: and the cavern is a
haunted spot henceforth to him and to all his tribe. It is in vain
that his family tell him that he has been lying asleep at home all
the while.
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