_Images._--Although the Dayaks adhere with great strictness to the command not to make any graven image for purposes of worship, yet in some tribes they are in the habit of forming a rude figure of a naked man and woman, which they place opposite to each other on the path to the farms. On their heads are head-dresses of bark, by their sides is the betel-nut basket, and in their hands a short wooden spear. These figures are said to be inhabited each by a spirit who prevents inimical influences from passing on to the farms, and likewise from the farms to the village, and evil betide the profane wretch who lifts his hand against them,--violent fever and sickness are sure to follow. Among the tribes of Western Sarawak the priestesses have made for them rude figures of birds. At the great harvest feasts they are hung up in bunches of ten or twenty in the long common room, carefully veiled with coloured handkerchiefs. They are supposed to become inhabited by spirits, and it is forbidden for any one to touch them, except the priestesses. _Dreams._--The Dayaks regard dreams as actual occurrences. They think that in sleep the soul sometimes remains in the body, and sometimes leaves it and travels far away, and that both when in and out of the body it sees, and hears, and talks, and altogether has a prescience given it, which, when the body is in its natural state, it does not enjoy. Fainting fits, or a state of coma, are thought to be caused by the departure or absence of the soul on some distant expedition of its own. When any one dreams of a distant land, as we exiles often do, the Dayaks think that our souls have annihilated space, and paid a flying visit to Europe during the night. Elders and priestesses often assert that in their dreams they have visited the mansion of Tapa, and seen the Creator dwelling in a house like that of a Malay, the interior of which was adorned with guns and gongs and jars innumerable, Himself being clothed like a Dayak. A dream of sickness to any member of a family always ensures a ceremony; and no one presumes to enter the priesthood, or to learn the art of a blacksmith, without being, or pretending to be, warned in a dream that he should undertake to learn it. I have known a man with only two children give his younger child to another who was no relation, because he dreamed that he must give it to him or the child would die.