Yet children who reflect soon find out that dream-objects do not belong to the common world, in the sights of which we all partake. Another theory has then to be found. I believe that many children, especially those who, being imaginative when awake, make their fairy-stories and their own romancings very real to themselves, and who, as a result of this, are wont to return to them in their dreams, are inclined to identify dreamland and fairyland. If they want to see their "fairies" by day they will shut their eyes; and so the idea may naturally enough occur to them that when closing their eyes for sleep they are going to see the beloved fairies again, and for a longer time. Other ideas about dreams also occur among children. A gentleman tells me that when a child he used to think that dreaming, though different from actual seeing, was yet more than having one's own individual fancies; on dreaming, for example, that he had met certain people he supposed that each of these must have had a dream in which he had met him. This, it may be remembered, is very much the fanciful idea of dreaming which Mr. Du Maurier works out in his pretty story _Peter Ibbetson_. There is some evidence to show that a thoughtful child, when he begins to grasp the truth that dreams are only unreal phantasms, becomes confused, and wonders whether the things too which we see when waking are not unreal. Here is a quaint example of this transference of childish doubt from dreamland to the every-day world. A little boy five years old asked his teacher: "Wouldn't it be funny if we were dreaming?" and being satisfied by the reply elicited that it would be funny, he continued more explicitly: "Supposing every one in the whole world were dreaming, wouldn't _that_ be funny? They might be, mightn't they?" Receiving a slightly encouraging, "Perhaps they might," he wound up his argument in this fashion: "Yes, but I don't think we are--I'm sure we are not. Perhaps we should wake up and find _every one_ gone away." This is dark enough, but suggests, I think, that doubt as to the bright beautiful forms seen in sleep is casting its shadow on the real world, on the precious certainty of the presence of those we love. A little girl about six and a half years old being instructed by her father as to the making of the world remarked: "Perhaps the world's a fancy". The doubt in this case too was, one may conjecture, led up to by the loss of faith in dreamland. _Birth and Growth._ We may now pass to some of children's characteristic thoughts about living things, more particularly human beings, and the familiar domestic animals. The most interesting of these, I think, are those respecting growth and birth.