University of Washington. He has made extensive field studies among the Oregon Indians, especially in the Coos Bay region. His study of dreams is particularly important and this essay on the subject was generously furnished by him for use in this history of Oregon literature.
My two informants for Coos ethnology differed fundamentally in their descriptions of the ancient culture that neither of them had more than heard about. And nowhere did their statements part further than on the matter of dreams and dream interpretation. Informant A had lived his life mainly among natives of the lower Umpqua and Siuslaw River cultures immediately north of the Coos. Possibly this circumstance accounts for the discrepant accounts. Informant B, an older and more alert-minded person, had had more intimate years among Coos natives, and probably reported more accurately about Coos beliefs. I will try to unite here what I think can be safely pictured, from the two informants.
Coos natives' dreams had no direct effect upon Coos beliefs or oral literature. Dreams functioned as cause in what may be called most conveniently the religious aspect of Coos life. It was in dreams particularly that they learned of guardian spirit powers that had come to them, and those guardian-powers in the dreams sang songs that became the natives' own songs, sung privately when communing with or calling upon their guardians.
The folklore was another realm entirely: it involved the winter night recounting of ancient myths and tales. In the folk literature dreaming did enter, in a sense, when animal dramatis personae themselves "dreamed." The myth characters—usually animals—were believed to have lived in the long ago like persons and to have had dreams like persons' dreams.
Coos Indians seem to have had the most acute interest in the details of their nightly dreams. If in a dream what was assumed to be a potential guardian spirit was seen and heard, and it said that it conferred some sort of power on the dreamer, or sang to that effect, that dream—it was inter-
