Moreover, these souls or spirits (which quitted the body in sleep or trance) outlived death, and appeared again to survivors. In dreams, we often see the shapes of living men; but we also see with peculiar vividness the images of the departed. Everybody is familiar with the frequent reappearance {048}in sleep of intimate friends or relations lately deceased. These appearances, I fancy, are especially frequent during the first few months of bereavement, and gradually weaken in frequency and vividness as time goes on. The reason for both sets of phenomena I take to be this: the nervous structures, accustomed to be stimulated in particular combinations by intercourse with the dead friend, miss automatically their wonted stimulation; and being therefore in a highly nourished and unstable state, are peculiarly ready to undergo ideal stimulation in sleep, as we know to be the case with other well-nurtured and underworked nerve-centres. Or, to put it less materially, the brain falls readily into a familiar rhythm. But in course of time the channels atrophy by disuse; the habit is lost; and the dream-appearances of the dead friend grow more and more infrequent. The savage, however, accepts the dream-world as almost equally real with the world of sense-presentation. As he envisages the matter to himself, his soul has been away on its travels without its body, and there has met and conversed with the souls of dead friends or relations. We must remember also that in savage life occasions for trance, for fainting, and for other abnormal or comatose nervous conditions occur far more frequently than in civilised life. The savage is often wounded and fails from loss of blood; he cuts his foot against a stone, or is half killed by a wild beast; he fasts long and often, perforce, or is reduced to the very verge of starvation; and he is therefore familiar, both in his own case and in the case of others, with every variety of unconsciousness and of delirium or delusion. All these facts figure themselves to his mind as absences of the soul from the body, which is thus to him a familiar and almost every-day experience.