y its
passing strangeness filled us with wonder, we naturally call it
dream-like.

_Theories of Dreams._

The earliest theories respecting dreams illustrate very clearly this
perception of the remoteness of dream-life from waking experience. By
the simple mind of primitive man this dream-world is regarded as similar
in its nature or structure to our common world, only lying remote from
this. The savage conceives that when he falls asleep, his second self
leaves his familiar body and journeys forth to unfamiliar regions, where
it meets the departed second selves of his dead ancestors, and so on.
From this point of view, the experience of the night, though equal in
reality to that of the day, is passed in a wholly disconnected
region.[69]

A second and more thoughtful view of dreams, marking a higher grade of
intellectual culture, is that these visions of the night are symbolic
pictures unfolded to the inner eye of the soul by some supernatural
being. The dream-experience is now, in a sense, less real than it was
before, since the phantasms that wear the guise of objective realities
are simply images spread out to the spirit's gaze, or the direct
utterance of a divine message. Still, this mysterious contact of the
mind with the supernatural is regarded as a fact, and so the dream
assumes the appearance of a higher order of experience. Its one point of
attachment to the experience of waking life lies in its symbolic
function; for the common form which this supernatural view assumes is
that the dream is a dim prevision of coming events. Artemidorus, the
great authority on dream interpretation (_oneirocritics_) for the
ancient world, actually defines a dream as "a motion or fiction of the
soul in a diverse form signifying either good or evil to come;" and even
a logician like Porphyry ascribes dreams to the influence of a good
demon, who thereby warns us of the evils which another and bad demon is
preparing for us. The same mode of viewing dreams is quite common
to-day, and many who pride themselves on a certain intellectual culture,
and who imagine themselves to be free from the weakness of superstition,
are apt to talk of dreams as of something mysterious, if not distinctly
ominous. Nor is it surprising that phenomena which at first sight look
so wild and lawless, should still pass for miraculous interruptions of
the natural order of events.[70]

Yet, in spite of this obvious and impressive element of the mysterious