children—in this case the children of two brothers were brought up in common as brothers and sisters—is it not probable that our dreamer, at that time not yet four years old, asked a wise, grown-up person: "What becomes of children when they are dead?" The answer probably was: "They get wings and become angels." According to this explanation all the brothers and sisters and cousins in the dream now have wings like angels and—this is the important thing—they fly away. Our little angel-maker remains alone, think of it, the only one after such a multitude! The feature that the children are romping about on a meadow points with little ambiguity to butterflies, as though the child had been led by the same association which induced the ancients to conceive Psyche as having the wings of a butterfly.
Perhaps some one will now object that, although the inimical impulses of children towards their brothers and sisters may well enough be admitted, how does the childish disposition arrive at such a height of wickedness as to wish death to a competitor or stronger playmate, as though all transgressions could be atoned for only by the death-punishment? Whoever talks in this manner forgets that the childish idea of "being dead" has little else but the words in common with our own. The child knows nothing of the horrors of decay, of shivering in the cold grave, of the terror of the infinite Nothing, which the grown-up person, as all the myths concerning the Great Beyond testify, finds it so hard to bear in his conception. Fear of death is strange to the child; therefore it plays with the horrible word and threatens another child: "If you do that again you will die, as Francis died," whereat the poor mother shudders, for perhaps she cannot forget that the great majority of mortals do not succeed in living beyond the years of childhood. It is still possible, even for a child eight years old, on returning from a museum of natural history, to say to its mother: "Mamma, I love you so; if you ever die, I am going to have you stuffed and set you up here in the room so I can always, always see you!" So little does the childish conception of being dead resemble our own.[1]
- ↑ I heard the following idea expressed by a gifted boy of ten, after the sudden death of his father: "I understand that father is dead, but I cannot see why he does not come home for supper."
