Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/474

434 tion of dreams; and so dreams, their results and their meaning, play an important part in Indian folktales. They frequently occur in the Legends, where they are usually of the prophetic sort, a start being given to a story by the hero's dream of the heroine or vice versâ; an idea neatly turned to practical use in some stories of saints by making the saintly hero fix on a preceptor owing to a dream. The idea is further useful in tales about the recovery of recalcitrant followers, by making the saint terrify them through dreams. The actual method of utilising dreams in folktales is to make the hero or heroine follow them up in their subsequent waking hours, often to their great temporary tribulation. And of the familiar warning or prophetic dream of the western world, there is one quaint example, in which a doe is made to warn her husband, the buck, of his impending death at the hands of the huntsmen, by telling him a vividly related dream as to the details of it.

The interpretation of dreams is a form of augury or divination, i.e. it is a means of foretelling the future from occurrences to human beings which are beyond control, though the latter terms in themselves imply an attempt to forecast the future from natural occurrences beyond human control that take place only in the surroundings of mankind. In the Legends direct references to augury and divination are few, and then only stock ones relating chiefly to marriage ceremonies; which last may in India be best described as one prolonged effort to sacerdotally control and foretell the future. But all over the world the commonest and most universal mode of arriving at an idea of the future from chance occurrences in the natural world around us lies in omens and their interpretation, and of these we are treated to a great number in the Legends, as might be expected. They are all, however, of the usual sort, except perhaps that it is unlucky in the Himalayas to give milk to a warrior on the war-path. With this exception we have dished up for us the well-worn superstitions relating to the meeting of