Page:Shinto, the Way of the Gods - Aston - 1905.djvu/356

346 man who has to earn a living and support a family from indulging in any such foolish imaginations. The analogy of his own day-dreams, which he must know to be unreal, is too obvious to be disregarded.

It is true that we do not find much evidence of this attitude of mind in books of travel or history. Nobody thinks it worth while to commit to paper instances of so very evident a fact. Most men are comparatively uninterested in the normal and familiar. Travellers, and sometimes even men of science, are prone to neglect the universal and commonplace for the strange and unusual. Like Desdemona, they seriously incline to hear of

Herbert Spencer thinks that the primitive man accepts the events dreamed as events that have actually occurred, and adduces evidence which no doubt shows that there really is a current of thought to that effect among savages and others. For the reasons above stated I prefer to regard such cases as abnormal and exceptional. The Kojiki and Nihongi have many instances of Gods appearing to men in dreams and giving them instructions. These are doubtless inventions of some scribe, but they indicate a belief in the possibility of such occurrences. Hirata thought it possible by witchcraft to cause people to have dreams.

A more frequent view of dreams is that, although not in themselves realities, it is possible by suitable interpretation to deduce truth from them—usually in the form of predictions of the future. There are cases of this kind in the old Japanese records. A deer, for example, dreams that a white mist has come down and covered him. This portends that he will be killed by hunters and his body covered with white salt.

There is evidence that some men occasionally attain in