In some obstinate cases of loss of dream-soul, however, the most experienced medical man will fail to get the fresh soul inserted. It clings to his fingers, it whisks back into the basket or into his hair or clothes, and it chirrups dismally, and the patient becomes convulsed. This is a grave symptom, but the diagnosis is quite clear. The patient has got a _sisa_ in him, so there is no room for the fresh soul.
Now, a _sisa_ is a dreadful bad thing for a man to have in him, and an expensive thing to get out. It is the surviving soul of a person who has not been properly buried--not had his devil made, in fact. And as every human surviving soul has a certain allotted time of existence in a human body before it can learn the dark and difficult way down to Srahmandazi, if by mischance the body gets killed off before the time is up, that soul, unless properly buried and sent on the way to Srahmandazi, or any other Hades, under expert instruction given as to the path for the dead, becomes a _sisa_, and has to hang about for the remaining years of its term of bodily life.
These _ensisa_ are held to be so wretchedly uncomfortable in this state that their tempers become perfect wrecks, and they grow utterly malignant, continually trying to get into a human body, so as to finish their term more comfortably. Now, a _sisa's_ chief chance of getting into a body is in whipping in when there is a hole in a man's soul chamber, from the absence of his own dream-soul. If a _sisa_ were a quiet, respectable soul that would settle down, it would not matter much, for the dream-soul it supplants is not of much account. But a _sisa_ is not. At the best, it would only live out its remaining term, and then go off the moment that term was up, and most likely kill the souls it had been sheltering with by bolting at an inconvenient moment. This was the verdict given on the death of a man I knew who, from what you would call faintness, fell down in a swamp and was suffocated. Inconvenient as this is, the far greater danger you are exposed to by having a _sisa_ in you lies in the chances being 10 to 1 that it is stained with blood, for, without being hard on these unfortunate unburied souls, I may remark that respectable souls usually get respectably buried, and so don't become _ensisa_. This blood which is upon it the devils that are around smell and go for, as is the nature of devils; and these devils whip in after the _sisa_ soul into his host in squads, and the man with such a set inside him is naturally very ill--convulsions, delirium, high temperature, &c., and the indications to your true witch doctor are that that _sisa_ must be extracted before a new dream-soul can be inserted and the man recover.