Page:Primitive Culture Vol 1.djvu/459

Rh lest his soul be troubled, and quit the body altogether. The New Zealanders considered the dreaming soul to leave the body and return, even travelling to the region of the dead to hold converse with its friends. The Tagals of Luzon object to waking a sleeper, on account of the absence of his soul. The Karens, whose theory of the wandering soul has just been noticed, explain dreams to be what this la sees and experiences in its journeys when it has left the body asleep. They even account with much acuteness for the fact that we are apt to dream of people and places which we knew before; the leip-pya, they say, can only visit the regions where the body it belongs to has been already. Onward from the savage state, the idea of the spirit's departure in sleep may be traced into the speculative philosophy of higher nations, as in the Vedanta system, and the Kabbala. St. Augustine tells one of the double narratives which so well illustrate theories of this kind. The man who tells Augustine the story relates that, at home one night before going to sleep, he saw coming to him a certain philosopher, most well known to him, who then expounded to him certain Platonic passages, which when asked previously he had refused to explain. And when he (afterwards) enquired of this philosopher why he did at his house what he had refused to do when asked at his own: 'I did not do it,' said the philosopher, 'but I dreamt I did.' And thus, says Augustine, that was exhibited to one by phantastic image while waking, which the other saw in a dream. European folklore, too, has preserved interesting details of this primitive dream-theory, such as