In truth, the very name of dream suggests something remote and mysterious, and when we want to characterize some impression or scene which by its passing strangeness filled us with wonder, we naturally call it dream-like.
_Theories of Dreams._ The earliest theories respecting dreams illustrate very clearly this perception of the remoteness of dream-life from waking experience.

By the simple mind of primitive man this dream-world is regarded as similar in its nature or structure to our common world, only lying remote from this.

The savage conceives that when he falls asleep, his second self leaves his familiar body and journeys forth to unfamiliar regions, where it meets the departed second selves of his dead ancestors, and so on.
From this point of view, the experience of the night, though equal in reality to that of the day, is passed in a wholly disconnected region.[69] A second and more thoughtful view of dreams, marking a higher grade of intellectual culture, is that these visions of the night are symbolic pictures unfolded to the inner eye of the soul by some supernatural being.

The dream-experience is now, in a sense, less real than it was before, since the phantasms that wear the guise of objective realities are simply images spread out to the spirit's gaze, or the direct utterance of a divine message.

Still, this mysterious contact of the mind with the supernatural is regarded as a fact, and so the dream assumes the appearance of a higher order of experience.