On Dreams 342–370

the worse. This divination I want both to have for myself and to leave to my children. For it one need not pack and set out on a long road or a voyage abroad, as to Pytho or to Ammon; it is enough to wash one's hands, speak words of good omen, and fall asleep. "She washed, put clean garments on her body, and prayed to Athena." So we shall ask for a dream, as Homer perhaps asked. And if you are fit, the god who was far off is present, since he comes each time even to those who have taken none of this trouble, but have only fallen asleep. And this is the whole business of the rite; and on its account no one has ever lamented poverty, as though the poor man had less of it than the rich. Some cities, indeed, choose their hierophants as

they choose their costliest public officers. And one needs great expense and not least good luck to gather a Cretan herb, an Egyptian feather, an Iberian bone, and, by Zeus, any portentous thing that grows and is reared in some corner of land or sea, "both when Hyperion sets and when he rises." For these and many such things are said about those who practise outward divination as a craft. Against such costs, what private person could suffice from his means? But a dream is seen by the man of five hundred bushels, and seen by the man of three hundred; and no less by the zeugite, and by the one who works the outlying land, scraping a living; by the rower and the hired labourer alike, by the citizen and the resident alien who pays his tax. It makes no difference to the god who is an Eteobutad and who is Manes, newly bought. Its popular character is very humane, its simplicity and self-sufficiency

very philosophic, its freedom from force pious; and its being present everywhere, without occupying a spring or a rock or a chasm of the earth, is most godlike of all. That this kind of divination does not leave us unable to do anything else, and does not rob us of our time — this was worth saying first. For no one has left some useful work in hand and gone home to sleep by appointment with a dream; but the time that the living being must spend on nature, since our substance is not enough for the activity of waking, comes bringing to people, as the saying goes, a by-work greater than the work, adding what is choiceworthy to what is necessary and well-being to being. But as for the foreknowledges that come by means of elaborate instruments, one should be content if, after taking the greater part of life, they leave anything at all to the other needs and actions. And if you were wholly taken up with one of those, you would hardly be helped by that divination toward it; for not every time nor every place admits the apparatus of the rite, nor does every convenience carry the instruments for it. Only lately a whole wagon or the cargo of a hollow ship was crammed with them, together with other parts of the rites and men who recorded and witnessed them; so

it is truer to say, since our time has exposed many things through those who served the laws, and these, once disclosed, have become sights and sounds for the profane crowd. Besides its being wretched to bend over such things, it is, I am persuaded, also hateful to God; for not to wait for anyone to come willingly, but to move him by shoving and levering, is like using force — which even among men the lawgiver did not leave unpunished. On top of all these difficulties, those who pursue the future in this way have their activity interrupted, and when they go abroad they leave the art behind, as it were; for it is no small task to carry the baggage for it wherever one walks. But in divination by dreams each person is himself the instrument, so that he could not leave the oracle behind even if he wished. It stays at home with him when he stays, goes abroad with him when he travels, campaigns with him, takes part in public life with him, farms with him and trades with him. The laws of a jealous state do not forbid it, nor could they if they wished; for they have no proof against those who use it. What wrong could we do by sleeping? Nor could a tyrant order people not to see dreams,

unless he banished sleep from his realm as well. But that would be the act of a fool, since he wants impossible things, and of an impious man, since he legislates against nature and God. So let woman and man, old and young, poor and rich, private man and ruler, townsman and countryman, artisan and orator betake themselves to it; it rejects no race, no age, no fortune, no art. It is present to all everywhere, a ready prophetess, a good counsellor, discreet. It is both mystagogue and initiate, announcing good things so as to lengthen the pleasure by snatching the enjoyment beforehand, and disclosing the worse so that one may guard against it and ward it off in advance. For whatever good and gentle things the hopes that feed the human race hold out, and whatever provident and useful things fear contains, all are in dreams,

and by nothing are we so persuaded to hope. And the thing called hope is so great and so saving in our nature that the clever sophists say people would not even have wished to live, as they were at first; they would have given up under the terrors that surround life, had not Prometheus poured hopes into their nature, a drug for endurance, led by which they think what they expect more trustworthy than what they see. Hopes have such strength that the man bound in fetters, when he lets his judgment hope as it pleases, is set free, goes on campaign, is at once a soldier on double pay, a little later a captain, then a general; he wins, sacrifices, wears a crown, and sets a table — Sicilian if he likes, or Median. And he forgets his feet as long as he wishes to be a general. Yet all this is the waking of a dreamer and the dream of a waking man; for both arise in the same subject, the imaginative nature, which, when we wish to make images, gives us this one useful thing:

it anoints our life with good cheer, and, flattering the soul with wandering hopes, lifts it out of the hardships of perception. But when it puts forth hope for us of its own accord — and this happens when we sleep — we have the promise of our sleep as a pledge from God; so that anyone who prepares his mind to deal with the greater things which the dream held out to him has a double gain: delight before the events, and the skill to handle them when they come through having long considered them, as though they had already been part of his life. So the hope that Pindar hymned, speaking of a happy man — that "sweet hope, nurse of youth, cherishing his heart, goes with him, which most of all steers the much-turning mind of mortals" — one might say is not spoken of waking hope, the deceitful one that we fashion for ourselves; this whole praise was spoken by Pindar of a small part of dreams.

Divination by dreams, pursuing what has appeared with art, makes hope firmer, so that it does not seem to belong to the inferior kind. Homer's Penelope posits two gates of dreams and makes half of them deceitful, because she was not wise about dreams; had she known the art concerning them, she would have brought them all through the gate of horn. At any rate she is shown refuted and convicted of ignorance about the very vision she wrongly disbelieved: "The geese are the suitors, and I, who was the eagle, am now Odysseus." And he was under the same roof, and she was chatting with him about the vision. Through such things I seem to hear Homer saying that one should neither despair of dreams nor transfer the weakness of those who use them

to the nature of the things seen. That is why not even Agamemnon is right to accuse dreams of deceit, since he misunderstood the victory foretold: "He bade you arm the long-haired Achaeans with all speed; for now you might take the wide-wayed city." So he goes forth as though to take the city at the first shout, because he did not heed "with all speed," which means: if he armed the Greek host to a man. But for him Achilles and the phalanx of the Myrmidons were out of the fight, the boldest part of the army.

… to share command, and to accomplish all things for all — the things I spoke of a little before; but I have not yet made public what it has done for me myself. And yet nothing works with people so much as it shares their philosophy: many things that perplexed us awake it has revealed wholly when we slept, or helped us to find. For something of this kind happens, so that now one seems to be inquiring, and now to be oneself the discoverer and thinker. For me it has often helped to work out writings: it prepared the thought, fitted the diction, struck out one thing and brought in another. Once, too, when the whole structure of my style was running wild and inflamed with novel words in emulation of the outlandish,

one figure saying one thing, another telling what it was, another showing certain swellings that had grown on the tongue and needed smoothing, it brought it back to sobriety and checked the swelling. When I was hunting it once devised with me contrivances against beasts that run and hide with cunning; and once, when I had given up and was breaking camp, it ordered me to sit on, and promised good fortune on the appointed day, so that I stayed out of doors more gladly, trusting it. And when the day came, the good fortune came too, which showed me swarms of beasts caught in nets and by spears. My life is books and hunting, except when

I served as envoy — "would that I had not!" — and saw three ill-omened years of my life. And yet then above all I gained the most and greatest benefits from it. It made void the plots against me of sorcerers who conjure souls, revealing them all and saving me from all; it helped me manage public affairs so that the cities fared best; and it set me before the emperor with more boldness than any Greek ever had. Some care for some things, others for others; but dream divination is present to all, a good daemon to each, devising something for our waking cares. So wise a thing is the soul when it has leisure from the flood of the senses of the marketplace, which bring into it all kinds of alien things. For the forms it holds, and whatever it receives from mind, it offers, when it has become alone, to those turned toward the inner, and it ferries across what comes from the divine. For the god within the cosmos keeps company with it when it is so, because its nature springs from the same source. These kinds of dreams, then, are the more divine, and are either entirely or almost entirely distinct and clear, and

they would come to those who live by virtue, whether acquired by wisdom or grown up by habit. If ever they come to anyone else, it is rarely, though it may happen; but certainly a dream of the best kinds would not come to an ordinary person for some small matter. The rest, the large and most common kind, would be the riddling one, for which one must prepare the art. For it had, so to speak, a strange and outlandish birth, and, sprung from such things, it comes forth most unclear. For this is how it is. Everything that nature holds — things that are, that have come to be, and that will be, for this too is a mode of existence — sheds images, which leap off from their subsistence. For if each sensible thing is a form joined with matter, and we have detected the outflow of matter in the composite, reason requires that the nature of images too should drain off, so that in both parts

the composite may resemble what flows off. Of these images flowing off, the imaginative spirit is the clearest mirror. For they wander idly and slip from stability through the indefiniteness of their being and through being recognized by none of the things that are; and when they meet the psychic spirits, which are images too but have a seat in nature, they lean upon them and rest in them as at a hearth. The images of things that have come to be, since these have already passed into the activity of being, are sent off clearly, until by length of time they grow faint and fade; those of things that are, since they still stand, are more alive and distinct; but those of things to come are more indefinite and indistinct; for they are preludes of what is not yet present, blossomings of an incomplete nature, riddles that leap and spring off, as it were, from stored-up seeds. That is why an art is needed for the future; for the images that proceed from it are not inscribed and not manifest likenesses, as are those from things that are.

They are marvellous in nature even being so, since they come from things that have not yet come to be. But now something must be said about the art, and how it may be acquired. Best, then, is to have so prepared the divine spirit that it is thought worthy of the oversight of mind and God, and is not a receptacle for the indefinite images. The best nourishment is through philosophy, which produces calm in the passions — when these are stirred, the spirit is seized like a territory — and through a moderate and temperate diet, which least goads the living being and least causes tossing in the outermost body; for the shaking would reach as far as the first body, which must be steady and unshaken. But since this is easy for anyone to pray for, but of all things the most impossible to achieve, and we wish sleep to be useless to no one, come, let us seek some limit even in the indefinite — that is, let us set up an art concerning the images. It is as follows.

Just as sailors crossing the sea, when they have come upon some rock and then, landing, seen a city of men, take the same rock, as often as they see it, as a sign of the same city; and as with generals, whom we know will arrive, though we do not see them, from their forerunners — for whenever the same forerunners appeared, they came — so by the images each time we are given signs of the activity of things to come; for these are forerunners of the same things, and like of like. And as it is a pilot's fault not to recognize the same rock when it appears, nor be able to say off what land his ship is tossing — such a man sails without bearings — so one who has often seen the same vision, if he has not noted of what experience, fortune or action it was the prophet to him, uses his life foolishly, as that pilot uses his ship. We also foretell weather signs in a deep calm of the air, seeing a halo round the moon, because when people often saw it so, a storm followed:

"If it breaks, it means wind; if it fades, calm. Two halos ringing the moon would mean storm; a threefold halo would bring a greater storm, and more so if it is black, and more if it is broken." So in all things, as Aristotle and reason say, perception produced memory, memory experience, and experience art; and so let us proceed to the art concerning dreams. Some have already collected many books

of such observations; but I laugh at all of them and think them of little use. With the body, the lowest assemblage of the common elements, a universal art and a rule extending along with nature is possible; for for the most part it suffers the same things from the same causes, the differences among bodies of the same kind being small, and what is contrary to nature in them does not escape notice as disease — and even so we do not use such a rule. It is not so with the imaginative spirit: one differs from another even in its first nature, for one belongs to one sphere and another to another, by the greater part of its blend. "Truly wretched are those of all souls which pour down to earth from heaven; but most blessed, with threads beyond telling, are those which came from your radiance, lord, and from Zeus himself, under the strong necessity of the thread."

And this, then, was what Timaeus hinted, assigning to each soul a companion star. And souls that have departed from their nature by lingering about matter, one less and one more, as each was unlucky in its inclination, have defiled their spirit. Settled in bodies in this condition, a whole life comes to be in sin and disease of the spirit — contrary to nature for the spirit, because of its first nobility, but according to nature for the living being, since it was ensouled by a spirit so disposed — unless the order into which it ranks itself by using vice or virtue is also nature for it. For nothing is so versatile as spirit. How, then, among things unlike in nature, in custom and in passion, could the same things be shown by the same images? It is not so, nor could it be. How could troubled water and clear, still and moving, be affected alike by

the same shape? And if the turbidity differs from one to another in its colours, and the movements in their many patterns, then in each kind there would be a failure of the exact image. If it is different, then, whether some Phemonoe or someone else thinks fit to lay down universal rules about such things and set them in order, let us ask them whether a straight and a distorted mirror, made of unlike materials, naturally give back a like image of what is shown. But those people, I think, never did any philosophy at all about the spirit; they made their own, however it happened to be, the rule and measure for everyone. I do not deny that there is a likeness running through even things that differ; but what is unclear becomes more unclear when it is torn apart. And the image of the thing that has sprung forth was hard to recognize from the start; harder still to catch in each mode an image like a common phantasm.

For these reasons we must give up hope of common laws coming into being; but let each one have himself as the material of the art. Let him record in his memory with what events, and when, his visions coincided, and with what sort of visions. For a habit is gathered without difficulty around what is practised for some need; for the need reminds one of the practice, especially when the material is plentiful each time. And what could be more plentiful than dreams? What more enticing? They draw even fools to give them some thought. So it would be shameful for those who are ten years past youth still to need another seer, and not to have collected for themselves a great many theorems of the art. It would be wise also to write down the visions, waking and sleeping, and the coincidences, unless the city's way of life is boorish toward the novelty of the idea. For we shall think it right to join to the so-called day-books what we call night-books, so as to have memoranda of what passes in each of the two lives. For a life according to imagination

was posited by our account, now better and now worse than the middle, as the spirit has health or disease. In this way we should do something useful for the observation by which the art grows, with nothing slipping from our memory; and besides, it would be a refined entertainment to honour oneself with a history of oneself, waking and sleeping. And for those who care for style, I do not know whether any other subject would be a more varied exercise of the power of speaking. For if the Lemnian sophist says that day-books are good teachers of speaking well on every subject, since one may not look down even on lesser things but must go through all, trivial and serious, how is it not worth bringing night-books into the subject matter of expression?

25. One would see how great the task is if one tried to stretch speech alongside the phantasms, by which things together by nature are separated and things separated by nature are brought together, and one must by speech make the one who has not had the vision imagine it. It is no slight task to carry over to another an outlandish motion that has arisen in the soul. When by imagination things that are are thrust out of being, and things that in no way are and have no nature to be are brought into being, what means is there to present to those who have no notion of them from within a nature that has no name? And it shows these things not as many forms at once, nor bringing them in with time; and these too, just as the dream has them and holds them out; for we believe whatever it wishes. In all of this, to come through without great unseemliness would belong to the most perfect rhetoric. It acts boldly against us,

even against our judgment, giving something more than mere belief. For we are not unaffected by the sights: our assents and our feelings in advance are strong, we hate not least, many trickeries about these things assail sleepers, and pleasure is then above all at its sweetest, so that hatred and love rub off onto our souls into waking life. So if someone is not to utter lifeless words, but to accomplish what the speech was laboured for — to put the hearer into the same feeling and the same suppositions — he would need moving words. A man at once both wins, and walks, and flies, and imagination holds it all; how could diction hold it? And a man sleeps a dream and sees a dream, and gets up while asleep, as he thinks, and shakes off sleep while lying down, and philosophizes as he can about the dream that appeared; and this too is a dream, a double one. Then he disbelieves, and thinks the present to be waking and what appears to be alive. From this, by force, the

… to leave off, and wake up, and test oneself and detect the deceit. The Aloadae are punished for piling the mountains of Thessaly as siege-works against the gods; but no law of Adrasteia prevents the sleeper from rising from the earth more happily than Icarus, flying over eagles, and coming above even the highest spheres. One views the earth from far off, and points it out to the moon, though it is not even seen. One may converse with the stars and be with the invisible gods in the cosmos. What is said to be hard then becomes easy: the gods appear manifest; nor is there any jealousy of them. For a little after, the dreamer did not even come to earth, but is there. For nothing so belongs to dreams as to steal away what lies between, and

not to do things in time. Then the dreamer converses with sheep, takes their bleating for speech, and understands what they say. So novel and so broad is the range of subjects, if anyone dared to let his words loose upon them. I think fables too took their licence from dreams, in which the peacock, the fox and the sea speak. These are little beside the free rule of sleep. But though fables are a lesser part of dreams, the sophists loved them as training in expression. And yet, for those to whom fable is the beginning of the art, the dream would become its end; and it is possible not to have trained the tongue in vain, as with fables, but to be wiser in judgment as well.

For to a philosopher it would be a plaything, slackening his tension, as the Scythians do their bows; but for the rhetor let us assign it as the crowning piece of his displays. For they seem to me to practise their skill out of season on Miltiades and Cimon, and on certain nameless figures, a rich man and a poor man, enemies in politics — about whom I have seen even old men wrangling in the theatre. Yet both of them were very solemn in philosophy, and each, as one might guess, trailed talents' weight of beard; but nothing prevented them from reviling and being angry, and swinging their hands about disorderly as they delivered speeches on behalf of men — real men, as I then thought, but, as those who taught me otherwise said, men who neither existed nor ever came to be — I do not say perished, but never existed at all

in nature. For where could there be a constitution that gives the best citizen the prize of killing a fellow-citizen who opposed him in politics? And yet a man of ninety who contends over a fiction — to what occasion does he postpone the truth of his speeches? In general they seem to me not even to understand the name of their "exercise," which says that it is pursued for the sake of something else; they think the preparation is the end, and have loved the road as though it were where one must go. For they have made the exercise a contest, as if someone who had shadow-boxed in the palaestra should claim to be proclaimed victor in the pancration at Olympia. So great a drought of mind and downpour of words has taken hold of people, that there are some who can speak but have nothing they need to say, when they ought to enjoy themselves as Alcaeus and Archilochus did, who each spent their eloquence on their own lives. And so the succession of time keeps the memory of what they grieved at and what they rejoiced in. For they did not produce speeches treading on air, as this new clever race does on fabricated subjects, nor did they

give away their own good to others, as Homer and Stesichorus made the race of heroes more glorious by their poems, and we have profited from the prize of their virtue; but they themselves, as far as it lay with them, were neglected, and we have nothing to say of them except that they were skilled poets. Whoever, then, loves to be spoken of among people hereafter, and is conscious that he can bring forth immortal things on tablets, let him pursue the kind of writing that we are introducing against custom. Let him confidently entrust himself to time. It is a good guardian, when something is entrusted to it in accordance with God.