n warm themselves at a fire. It is especially the graves,
where their mouldering bodies are deposited, that these restless spirits
are supposed to haunt; it is there that they shew themselves either to
people generally or to such as have the second sight.[184] But it is
most commonly in dreams that they appear to the living and hold
communication with them. Often these communications are believed to be
helpful. Thus the tribes of the Wotjobaluk nation thought that the
ghosts of their dead relations could visit them in sleep to protect
them. A Mukjarawaint man told Dr. Howitt that his father came to him in
a dream and warned him to beware or he would be killed. This, the man
believed, was the saving of his life; for he afterwards came to the
place which he had seen in his dream; whereupon, instead of going on, he
turned back, so that his enemies, who might have been waiting for him
there, did not catch him.[185] Another man informed Dr. Howitt that his
dead uncle appeared to him in sleep and taught him charms against
sickness and other evils; and the Chepara tribe similarly believed that
male ancestors visited sleepers and imparted to them charms to avert
evil magic.[186]

[Sidenote: Savage faith in the truth of dreams. Association of the stars
with the souls of the dead.]

Such notions follow naturally from the savage theory of dreams. Almost
all savages appear to believe firmly in the truth of dreams; they fail
to draw the distinction, which to us seems obvious, between the
imaginary creations of the mind in sleep and the waking realities of the
physical world. Whatever they dream of must, they think, be actually
existing; for have they not seen it with their own eyes? To argue that
the visions of sleep have no real existence is, therefore, in their
opinion, to argue against the plain evidence of their senses; and they
naturally treat such exaggerated scepticism with incredulity and
contempt. Hence when they dream of their dead friends and relations they
necessarily conclude that these persons are still alive somewhere and
somehow, though they do not commonly appear by daylight to people in
their waking hours. Unquestionably this savage faith in the reality of
dreams has been one of the principal sources of the widespread, almost
universal, belief in the survival of the human soul after death. It
explains why ghosts are supposed to appear rather by night than by day,
since it is chiefly by night that men sleep and dre