Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/35

 some more fortunate or brave people have, on a rare day. The native draws a line between dream experience and matter-of-fact experience that is not the line we draw. What is only a false imaginative phantom-like trick of the mind to us, is assumed by the native to be an actual occurrence, and a most desirable though terrifying one, where real "dead people" were met, met not by the physical body but by its non-physical "soul" counterpart. No native would tell about such an encounter he assumed he himself had. But he would advise his children that if they have such an experience they should recognize it for what it is worth, be brave, and profit by it.

The natives' narrative-explanations of such things rank in the oral literature on a level beneath that occupied by what we may properly label "myth" narrations and which I called "folktales" above; this lowlier level of the oral literature may be labeled conveniently "tales". It may very well be that the part of the native literature that comes under the rubric "tales" is historically brief, and originally created out of the stuff of dreams, if not from occasional other sources. If the ancient animal myths or other myths of ancient beings are not traceable to dream origins, or affected much by dream mechanisms, we must assume that dream origins and mechanisms, whatever they were—and I fear we will never do much about analysis of them in the case of the nearly extinct Coos—did exercise some sort of role in the body of the Coos literature called "tales."

Once Tallapus was travelling from the country of the Tillamooks to the country of the Clatsops. Tallapus made himself into a coyote.