On Dreams

On Dreams. Preface. It is an ancient practice, I think, and very Platonic, to hide the serious matters of philosophy under the pretext of a humbler subject, so that what was found with difficulty may not again be lost from among men, nor be defiled by being exposed to profane crowds. This has been shown above all in the present writing. If it attains this, and in other respects has been exquisitely worked in the ancient manner, those with a philosophic nature will come to keep company with it.

If sleeps are prophets, and the visions of dreams hold out to people riddles of what will happen in waking life, they would be wise but not clear — and their unclearness is their wisdom. "For the gods keep hidden the livelihood of men." To attain the greatest things without toil is a divine good; but for humans the gods have set sweat before not only virtue but every fine thing. Divination would be the greatest of goods. For by knowing, and in general by the cognitive part of its power, God differs from man and man from beast. For God his nature is enough for knowing; but from divination a human being gains many times more than belongs to our common nature. For the many know only the present and guess about what has not yet happened; but divination …

Calchas alone, then, in the assembly of all the Greeks knew "the things that are, that will be, and that were before." And Homer makes the affairs of the gods depend on the judgment of Zeus for this reason, that he was born first and knows more, by the very fact of being older. For I think he directs the mention of age in the verses to this point, that with time one comes to know more, since knowing was the most honourable thing. If anyone is persuaded by other verses to think that Zeus's leadership is strength of hands, because he says "but in might he was stronger," he has dealt with the poetry vulgarly and has not heard its philosophy, which calls the gods nothing but minds. So the poet again puts "he was elder by birth" ahead of prevailing in strength, calling Zeus

a mind more primordial; and what would the strength of mind be but wisdom? So whatever god is thought worthy to rule the gods, being mind, rules by abundance of wisdom; and so "in might he was stronger" comes round, for us, to the same thing as "he knows more." That is why the wise man is akin to God: he tries to come near him in knowledge and busies himself with intellection, in which the divine has its being. These, then, are proofs that divination is among the best pursuits of human beings. If all things signify through all things, as being brothers in one living being, the cosmos, and these are letters of every kind written in beings as in a book — some Phoenician, some Egyptian, others Assyrian — and the wise man reads them (and wise is the one who has learned from nature), and

one reads by syllables, another the whole word at once, another the whole sentence together — so the wise see the future: some by knowing the stars, one the fixed ones and another the fiery shooting ones; some by reading it in entrails; some in the cries and perchings and flights of birds; for others the so-called tokens of what is to come are plain letters, voices and chance meetings that happen with another purpose, since all things are significant for all. So if there were wisdom among birds, they would have formed an art of the future from human beings, as we have from them. For we are to them, as they to us, "very young, and very old, and all-auspicious." For it was necessary, I think, since this whole is in sympathy and breathes together, that its parts should belong to one another, as

being limbs of one whole. And perhaps these are the charms of the magi; for things are charmed by one another just as they are signified by one another; and the wise man is the one who knows the kinship of the parts of the cosmos. He draws one thing through another, holding present pledges of things very far away — voices, materials and figures — just as in us, when one organ suffers, another suffers with it, and the pain in a finger settles in the groin while many parts between feel nothing; for both belonged to one living being, and they have something more toward each other than toward others. So to some god among those within the cosmos a stone from here and a herb belong, by which, sharing its passion, he yields to nature and is enchanted — as one who plucks the lowest string sets in motion not the string next to it, a ninth above, but the fourth and the highest. This already belongs to the more original concord; for among the parts, as in a family, there is also discord. The cosmos is not simply one, but one out of many; there are parts in it friendly to other parts and parts at war, and their strife agrees in the concord of the whole, as the lyre is a system

of sounds both dissonant and consonant; and the one out of opposites is the harmony of both lyre and cosmos. Archimedes of Sicily asked for a place outside the earth so that he could balance himself against the whole earth; for being on it, he said, he had no power against it. But whoever is wise in anything concerning the nature of the cosmos, if he were set outside it, could no longer make any use of his wisdom; for he uses the cosmos against itself. Were its continuity torn apart, he would look in vain, and the tokens would signify lifelessly. And whatever is divine outside the cosmos is all beyond the reach of spells: "he sits apart and does not care nor heed." For the nature of mind is inexorable; it is what can be acted upon that is charmed. The scope in divinations and

rites is provided by the multitude and the kinship of things in the cosmos — the multitude of things set apart, the kinship of things that are one. Rites my discourse must not touch, obeying the law of the state; but it is blameless to accept divination, and its whole range has been praised from what lies to hand. For now it is right to set apart the best kind and linger over the inquiry into it — a kind which has unclearness as a character common to all, so that we need not refute any of them, since what is seen in nature as a whole is well. And the argument showed this too to be solemn, like the ineffable in rites. So the oracles do not speak intelligibly to everyone; and as for Loxias, the oracle-singer at Pytho, the people in their assembly would have heard in vain that the wooden wall the god gave the Athenians would save them, had not Themistocles read the meaning of the oracle. So not even on this ground would divination through sleep be rejected, since it shares its concealment with the others and with the oracles. Above all, one must add this to its teaching: that it comes from us, from within, and is peculiar to each one's soul. Mind holds the forms of the things that are, says the ancient philosophy;

and we would add that soul holds the forms of the things that come to be, since what mind is to soul, that being is to becoming. Alternately, then, first to third and second to fourth; and taking it inversely we would be no less right, following the rules of science. So what we maintain would be proved: that the soul holds the forms of the things that come to be. It holds them all, then, but projects those that are fitting and mirrors them on the imagination, through which the living being perceives things that remain within. Just as we do not perceive the activities of mind before the attentive power reports them to the common sense, and whatever does not reach it escapes the living being, so neither do we perceive what is in the primary soul before its impressions reach the imagination. And this imagination seems to be a kind of life that has stepped down a little and come into a nature of its own. Sense-organs at least are present in it: we see colours and hear sounds and have the most striking perceptions by touch,

while the organic parts of the body are inactive. And perhaps this kind of sensation is more sacred. Through it, at any rate, we often meet with gods, who advise us, give us oracles, and take thought for us in other ways. So if someone has received a treasure as a gift of sleep, I do not count it among marvels; nor if a man fell asleep unmusical and then, meeting the Muses in a dream, speaking and hearing, became a skilled poet, as has happened in our time — not even this is very strange. I pass over plots revealed, and those whom sleep, as physician, has rid of disease. But when it opens a road to the most perfect visions of beings for a soul that never longed for the ascent nor even thought of it, this would be the supreme thing among beings: to rise above nature and to join to the intelligible one who has wandered so far as not to know where he came from.

If anyone thinks the ascent a great thing but distrusts the imagination, doubting that the blessed union could ever be obtained through it, let him hear the sacred oracles, what they say about different roads. After the whole list of resources from within for the ascent, by which one can increase the seed within, it says: "To some he gave to grasp the token of light by teaching; others, even while sleeping, he enriched with his strength." You see how it has distinguished two kinds of good fortune in learning: one man, it says, is taught awake, another in a dream. But awake, it is a man who teaches; the sleeper God

enriched with his strength, so that learning and attaining are the same; for "to enrich" is more than to teach. Let this be taken by us as a testimony to the worth of the life in imagination, against those who despair of it, and against those who, from an excess of wisdom, think it no wonder to know lesser things in this way, having become experts in what the oracles renounce. For it says: "I care nothing for these playthings of sacrifices and entrails," and bids us flee them. But these men, as being above the multitude, each take up different arts for foreseeing the future and think fit to practise them, while they despise dreams as a commonplace thing, in which the ignorant and the wise share equally. What, then, if one is wise in this, that he gets more than the common? For

the other goods too, and the greatest of them most of all, lie open to all in common: of things seen nothing is more divine than the sun, and nothing more public. If to see God face to face is a blessed thing, to grasp him through imagination belongs to a higher kind of seeing. For this is the sense of the senses, since the imaginative spirit is the most common sense-organ and the soul's first body. It dwells in the inmost part and holds the rule of the living being as from an acropolis; for around it nature built the whole structure of the head. Hearing and sight are not senses but organs of sense, servants of the common sense, like doorkeepers of the living being, reporting to their mistress the sensible things outside, by which the outer sense-organs are knocked upon. But it is a complete sense in all its parts: it hears with the whole spirit and sees with the whole, and can do all the rest; yet it distributes its powers, one here and another there, and they peep out of the living being each separately, like straight lines flowing out from a centre

and converging on the centre: all one at their common root, many in their going forth. The most animal kind of sensation, then, is that through the outward organs, which is not even sensation until it reaches the first; more divine and nearer to the soul is immediate sensation. If, honouring the bodily senses for the sake of knowing, since we know best what we have seen, we were to send imagination packing as less trustworthy than sense, we would seem to have forgotten that not even the eye shows everything truly: some things it does not show, and others it falsifies, both through the nature of the things seen and through the medium by which they are seen — distance makes them smaller or larger, things under water look larger, the oar appears broken — and through the eye's own weakness, for when it is rheumy it shows things confused and indistinct. So whoever has a sick imaginative spirit, let him not demand clear and distinct visions;

and about its disease — what makes it rheumy and thick, and what purifies and refines it and brings it back to its nature — inquire of the secret philosophy, by which, purified through rites, it becomes divine; and the intrusions run out before the god enters the imaginative spirit. Whoever keeps it pure by a life according to nature has it ready for use, so that in this way again it is most common to all. For this spirit perceives the disposition of the soul and is not without sympathy in itself, as the shell-like covering is; for that one is even opposed to the better dispositions of the soul. But the soul's first and proper vehicle is thinned and made ethereal when the soul is made good, and thickened and made earthy when it is made bad. For it is altogether a borderland between irrationality and reason, between the bodiless

… through it divine things meet the lowest. For this reason it is hard to grasp its nature by philosophy; for it gathers what suits it, as from neighbours, from each of the extremes, and things so far apart are imagined in one nature. Nature has poured out the breadth of the imaginative substance over many ranks of beings. It comes down even to animals in which mind is no longer present, and then it is not the vehicle of a more divine soul but itself rides upon the underlying powers, being itself the reason of the animal, and by it the animal thinks and does many things fittingly. It is purified even in irrational beings, so that it passes into a better state. Whole races of daemons have their being in such a life, for they are imaginal in their whole being and appear in things that come to be; but in man most things by itself

we do not make them without imagination — unless someone has at some instant had contact with an immaterial form; and to rise above imagination is no less hard than blessed. "For mind and wisdom," he says, "one may be content if they come even in old age" — meaning the imageless kind. The life put forward is either imagination's, or that of mind using imagination. This spirit of the soul, which the blessed have also called the spiritual soul, becomes god and daemon of every kind, and phantom, and in it the soul pays its penalties. The oracles agree about it, likening the soul's existence there to the imaginings of dreams; and philosophy

agrees that first lives are preparations for second lives, since the best disposition in souls lightens the spirit and wipes away the stain of the worse. So by natural pulls it is raised aloft through heat and dryness; and this is the soul's winged state; and we find that Heraclitus's saying, "the dry ray is the wisest soul," points to nothing else. Or, becoming thick and moist, it sinks into the holes of the earth by a natural tendency, lurking and thrust down into the underground region; for this place is most akin to moist spirits. There life is unhappy and full of punishment; but it is possible, purified by time and toil and other lives, to rise again. For having become amphibious, it runs a double course and in turn

consorts with the worse and the better. This spirit the first soul borrows from the spheres on its descent, and, boarding it like a boat, it keeps company with the bodily world. And it fights this contest: to bring it back up with itself, or at least not to remain down with it. It may happen — with difficulty — that the soul lets it go if it does not follow; for it is not lawful to disbelieve this, since the rites are known; but a return would be shameful for souls that did not give back what was not theirs, but left about the earth what they had borrowed from above. This would be a gift of rite and god to one or two; but nature holds that the soul, once grafted onto it, either rushes along with it and draws it, or is drawn. At any rate it must be with it until

by its badness it drags down the soul that let itself be weighed down. And this is what the oracles frighten the intellectual seed in us with: "Do not stoop down to the dark-gleaming world, beneath which lies ever a faithless depth, and Hades, cloudy all round, squalid, delighting in images, senseless." For how is a frenzied and senseless life good for mind? But to the phantom, because of the spirit's condition at that time, the region below belongs; for like delights in like. And if the two become one by their union, mind too would be plunged into the pleasure. Yet this would be the last of evils, not even to perceive the evil that is present; for this is the state of those who do not even seek to rise again,

as a hardened tumour, by no longer giving pain, does not even remind one to seek a cure. That is why repentance lifts us up: one who is vexed with what he has contrives a way of escape. And the greatest part of purification is the will; for the things done and said stretch out a hand to it, and in its absence every purifying rite is lifeless, lacking the greatest token. For this reason, here and there, judgments provide the greatest and best service to the order of beings, opposing pain to frenzied joy and cleansing the soul of it; and the misfortunes called undeserved contribute a great deal to loosening the attachment we have to things here. The first providence is brought in by these very things for those who have mind, and for the same reasons it is disbelieved by those who have none; for there is no way the soul could ever turn away from matter if it stumbled on no evil in things here. So one must think the much-talked-of

good fortunes an ambush laid for souls by the overseers of the regions below. Whether a draught of forgetfulness is given to souls as they leave, let another say; but to the soul entering life a draught of forgetfulness is held out: the sweetness and gentleness of things here. For coming down as a hireling for its first life, it serves of its own will as a slave instead of a hireling. The first was to perform a service to the nature of the cosmos, at the command of Adrasteia's ordinances; but bewitched by the gifts of matter, it has suffered like free men hired for an agreed time who, held by the beauty of a maidservant, wish to stay, agreeing to serve the master of their beloved. So we too seem, whenever we are swept away from the depth of our judgment toward what seem to be goods of the body and of outward things, to agree with the nature of matter that it is beautiful; and she accepts our assent as a secret contract; and if we

plan to leave as free men, she calls us runaways, tries to bring us back, and seizes us as deserters, reading out the contract. Then above all the soul needs strength and God as its helper; for it is no small contest to set aside one's own agreement, and perhaps even to use force. For material penalties are then set in motion, even beyond fate, against those who throw off her laws; and these are the so-called trials, which sacred stories say Heracles too endured, and anyone else who strove manfully for freedom, until they carry the spirit across to where the hands of nature cannot reach. But if the leap happens within her bounds, it is dragged down and heavier contests are needed; for she no longer spares it, as no longer hers; and if it despairs of the ascent, she exacts a penalty for the attempt and casts upon it lives, no longer from both of the jars,

which Homer secretly hints are the two portions of matter; and Zeus, for him in those verses, is the god who rules matter, the distributor of fate's twofold lot, from whom the good never comes unmixed, while some have received the worse unmixed. In general, all lives are a wandering which do not run back up by the same way as the first descent. See, then, how much this spirit lives as a citizen of the middle. When the soul inclines downward, the account said that it was weighed down and sank, until it met the dark-gleaming and cloudy region;

but when it ascends, the spirit follows as far as it is able to follow; and it can, until it comes fully to the opposite. For hear the oracles saying this too: "Not even the dross of matter will you leave to the precipice; the phantom too has its portion in the region bright all round." This is the opposite of the "cloudy all round." One might see something more sharply in these words: they seem to bring up to the spheres not only the nature that came from there, but also whatever of the summit of fire and air the soul drew into its image-nature as it came down, before it put on its earthy shell — this too, it says, it sends up with the better portion; for the divine body would not be dross. And it would be reasonable that things which shared a nature and contributed to one being should not be wholly without relation, especially those whose regions are neighbours, as fire is next to the heavenly body,

the better, yielding to the worse, enjoyed their fellowship and contributed a pure body to the slime; just as, made its own by what was granted to rule in the union, perhaps the worse too, not resisting the activity of the soul but obedient and docile, following along and offering the middle nature undistracted to the leadership of the first, would be made ethereal with it and sent up with it — if not all the way, at least crossing the summit of the elements and tasting the region bright all round; for it has, he says, a portion in it, that is, it comes into some rank of the circling body. But about the portion from the elements let this be said; one may disbelieve it or believe it. The bodily substance that came from there, however, by nature cannot fail, when the soul ascends, to be lifted up with it,

rising from the fall and being fitted to the spheres, that is, poured back as it were into its own nature. These, then, are the two extreme lots, the one cloudy all round, the other bright all round, which have been allotted the extremes of good fortune and misfortune. How many regions do you think there are between them in the hollow of the cosmos, light on one side and dark on the other, in all of which the soul dwells with this spirit, changing forms, characters and lives? When it has run back up to its own nobility, it is a storehouse of truth; for it is pure, transparent and undefiled, a god and a prophet if it wishes. But when it has fallen, it is darkened, indefinite, and lies; for the misty part of the spirit does not admit the activity of the things that are. When it is in between, it will miss some things and hit others. In this way one might judge a daemonic nature too, of whatever rank. For the unerring

… is near the divine. But error in predictions never ceases for those who wallow in matter, passionate and ambitious; for by this means the material spirit always disguises itself as god and higher daemon, leaps in and seizes the place prepared for the greater nature. In man too we might detect the rank of the soul from this: one whose imaginative spirit is pure and well defined, receiving true impressions of the things that are, awake and asleep, would have a promise, as far as the condition of his soul goes, of a better lot.

And not least from the images it projects and busies itself with, when it is not moved from outside by something else, let us track down in what condition the spirit of the soul is, philosophy supplying the criteria for this — so that we may nourish it and care for it and it may never go astray. The best nourishment is to act by the power of attention and, in short, to make the projection of life intellectual as far as possible, forestalling the impulses of absurd and rash images; for this is to be turned toward the better and detached from the worse, keeping company with it only as far as necessary. Intellectual attention is the most cutting of the things that act upon the spirit; for it thins it ineffably and stretches it up toward God; and once it has become fit, it draws a divine spirit by kinship into fellowship with the soul. Just so, when the spirit is rolled up by thickness and becomes too little to fill the regions assigned to it by the providence that formed man — and these are the ventricles of the brain — then, since nature tolerates no void among beings, an evil spirit slips in. And what would the soul not suffer when it lives with an abominable evil? For the regions made for this very purpose

for the spirit are by nature full either of the worse or of the better. The one is the punishment of the godless who have defiled the divine within them; the other is the goal of piety, or something near the goal. We, then, undertaking to speak about divination from dreams, so that people may not dishonour it but practise it, since it is of use to life, have for this purpose examined the imaginative nature closely. From the argument, the usefulness here has proved the lesser thing; the better fruit of a healthy spirit is the ascent of the soul, a truly sacred gain; so that it is also a practice of piety to try to make it prophetic for ourselves. Some, lured by a greed for foreknowledge, have already set before themselves a table sacred and simple instead of an inflamed one, and embraced a pure and undefiled bed. For one who uses his couch as a Pythian tripod is far from making the nights in it witnesses of licentiousness;

rather he worships God and prays first. Much is built up little by little, and what was done for another reason has ended in something greater: those who did not set out for this at first have advanced to loving God and at times being joined to him. So it is not right to neglect a divination that travels toward the divine and has as its companion the most precious of the things in human power. Nor is the use here any less for the soul joined to God because it has been thought worthy of contact with higher things; for it is not turned away from the living being, and it surveys things below from a watchtower much more clearly than if it were among them and mixed up with the worse; so that, remaining unmoved, it will give the living being images of what is coming to be. And this is the saying, "descending without descending," when the better cares without attachment for the

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.