n low tribes,
a vague feeling that it has extraordinary powers of perception; whether
such a feeling, if it exists, is connected with a belief that, during
sleep, the soul is freed from the limitations of the everyday corporeal
man we are not able with our present data to say.[1642] Savages often
follow the suggestions made in dreams[1643] (particularly when they are
vivid) and are confirmed in their faith by occasional fulfillments of
predictions; the mind, working during sleep on the observations made by
day, may sometimes fall on situations that afterwards really appear, and
a few such realizations are sufficient to establish a rule or creed.

+922+. This naive conception of dreams as products of the soul's
perception of realities survives to a greater or less extent among
higher tribes and nations, but finally gives way, when some sort of
theistic construction is reached, to the view that they are sent
immediately by deities. An approach to this view appears in North
America when, for example, a Pawnee Indian sees in a dream some being
who gives him important information, though in the folk-tales nothing is
said of the source of the dream.[1644] A step in advance appears in the
belief of the Ashanti, according to which the existence of a tutelary
family deity is indicated in a dream;[1645] it is, however, not clear
whether or not they hold that the tutelary deity has himself suggested
the dream. In the higher religions a dream is often sent by a patron
deity as a prediction or for guidance in a coming emergency. Doubtless
it was only in the case of specially distinct dreams and such as related
to important matters that attention was paid to them--the deity
intervened only in affairs that called for his special direction.
Examples are numerous in the history of the great nations of antiquity.
The Egyptian King Merneptah in a time of great danger had a dream in
which the god Ptah appeared to him and bade him banish fear;[1646] and
the Hebrew Yahweh is represented as having sent dreams to a king of
Egypt (probably in the interests of the Hebrews) to warn him of a coming
famine.[1647] The Assyrian Ashurbanipal was favored with special
communications from Ishtar, and the god Ashur in a dream ordered Gyges,
King of Lydia, to submit to the Assyrian king.[1648] In some documents
of the Pentateuch Yahweh regularly announces his will in dreams to both
Hebrews and non-Hebrews;[1649] and a Hebrew writer of a later time (the
thi