CHAPTER III. ON DREAMS AS PROPHETIC, PREMONITORY, ETC. WHY THE SOUL MAY BE PROPHETIC IN SLEEP. GONZALO. "I AM of opinion with Volaterans, that many times a person going to his rest, not cloyed with bad affections nor superfluity of food, but being vertuously minded and healthfully disposed, his soule in sleeping may foresee things to come; for the soule, which of itselfe is divine and celestiall, being not offended with any evill cogitations, or over-bad meats, is at free liberty, and best performeth her actions when the body sleepeth, not being busied with any other matters.”—The Divine Dreamer; or a short treatise discovering the true effect and power of Dreames; confirmed by the most learned and best approved authors. 1641. Dedicated "to the vertuous Carinda, by her servant Gonzalo." ON DREAMS. REV. MR. GREAVES. "Dreams are from Jove," thus sung the bard of old. The modern sage,* if not more wise, more bold, From earth, from clay, their origin has brought. * Dr. P. (probably Dr. Priestley). 134 66 DREAMS ARE FROM JOVE." "The soul's a mere machine;" they thence explain But how can fancy then her vigils keep, "Dreams are from Jove!" their origin divine: She rhymes, harangues, or hails the absent friend; Thus dreams display the grandeur of the soul. Universal Magazine, vol. lxi., December, 1777. OBJECTIONS TO THE PROPHETIC CHARACTER OF DREAMS. JAMES BEATTIE, LL.D. "We are warranted by authentic history to believe that dreams have given information of future events. Hence weak people infer that they always were, or still may be prophetical. But nothing is more absurd. Because in ancient times there were prophets and holy men, shall I, therefore, conclude that I am a saint or a prophet? Because the Deity has been pleased to reveal Himself in an extraordinary manner to some persons set apart by Him for extraordinary purposes, shall I therefore imagine that He will reveal to me the trifling occurrences of my life a few days before they happen? He has in great mercy concealed from us the knowledge of what is to SUPERSTITIOUS CREDENCE. 135 come, except so far as was necessary to us, and could not be made out by human reason. For man acquainted with futurity would be both useless and miserable. For him all curiosity and enterprise would be at an end, and all hope extinguished; future evils would torment him before they came; and future good, by being anticipated, would lose every charm that surprise and novelty confer upon it. And he would sit down, motionless and stupid, in expectation of evil which he could not avoid, and of good which would give rise neither to activity nor desire. An oyster endowed with sight and hearing, consciousness and reason, would not be a more wretched creature. Even when God has foretold future events by his prophets, He has generally delivered the prophecy in terms that could not be fully understood till after it was accomplished, for otherwise it must have interfered with the principles of human action, and with the ordinary course of human affairs. "Is it not strange, if dreams are prophetical, that, after the experience of so many ages, we should never have found out any rational way of expounding them? And if some are prophetical, but not all, is it not strange that every species of dream should be equally familiar to good men and to bad? For of each character there are some superstitious people who believe in dreams, and some more rational who do not. To say that dreams are of divine origin, implies (as Aristotle has well observed) many absurdities, and this among others, that it is not to the wisest and best men they are sent, but to all indiscriminately.* "The rules by which the vulgar pretend to interpret dreams are too ridiculous to be mentioned. They are indeed such as may make almost any dream prophetical of any event. If a dream and a subsequent occurrence be the same or similar, then they believe that the dream foretold it; if totally different, and even contrary, they still believe that the dream foretold it. * Aristotle, "De Divinatione per Somnia." 136 COINCIDENCES TO BE EXPECTED. "That there may occasionally be a coincidence of a dream with a future event, is nothing more than one has reason to expect from the revolution of chances. It would indeed be wonderful, considering the variety of our thoughts in sleep, and that they all bear some analogy to the affairs of life, if this did never happen. But there is nothing more extraordinary in it than that an idiot should sometimes speak to the purpose, or an irregular clock once or twice a year point to the right hour. The same coincidence of a reality with a previous imagination is observable when we are awake, as when a friend whom we did not expect, happens to come in view the very moment we were thinking or speaking of him; a thing so common, that both in Latin and in English, it may be expressed by a proverb."—Dissertations, Moral and Critical. PROPHECY AND INSTINCTIVE ANTICIPATION. "It is obvious, that in a prophetic dream, a person may have the conclusions of waking thoughts (he having deduced them unconsciously) re-excited and made manifest to his consciousness in a dream, under which circumstances they will appear new. Or the thoughts may actually occur during the dream, as if in the waking state, at the same time becoming objects of consciousness, yet instinctively and automatically, and therefore with the precision of instinctive reasoning. "It is in this way, we suspect, that dreams have proved prophetic. Prescience,-one of the most striking and inscrutable of the instinctive faculties,--is also that which is most commonly in operation in instinctive life. Hence it is not remarkable that that faculty which dominates among all the instincts of irrational creatures, should re-appear in the human organism when it is thrown by suspension of the cerebral senses into the irrational condition. It seems strange that organized matter should have this innate prescience, but it is manifest throughout nature, from the evolution of the germ INNATE PRESCIENCE. 137 and the anticipatory formation of the organs necessary to successive phases of existence, to the prudent foresight of We may well ask, with Pope, adult life. Who taught the nations of the field and wood Who forms the phalanx, and who points the way ? If, then, this anticipation of the future be so universally manifest in organized matter that there is no exception, can we with any inductive propriety, except the organism of man from the universal law? We apprehend not. The simple fact that all nature anticipates a real future, is, indeed, the strongest argument in natural theology for the reality of a future state; because, since that anticipation is innate in organisms, as a law of their being, so it must needs be innate in man as a law of his being. And in what clime or region is man without a hope of future life? Lo, the poor Indian, whose untutored mind Sees God in clouds, or hears Him in the wind, His soul proud science never taught to stray Yet simple nature to his hope has given, Behind the cloud-topped hill a humbler heaven. The apparently prophetic anticipation of events in dreams is, then, a natural phenomenon, and so far from being closely allied with the purely spiritual world in causation, it depends upon the special exercise of one of the most common, if not he most universal, of instincts. Our knowledge of the inner |