On Dreams

Contents

Reading pages: 311–341 · 342–370

1. 311Synesius's preface to On Dreams: like Plato, he hides serious philosophy under a humble subject.
2. 312Dreams, like all divination, speak in riddles; divination is a great good, giving humans knowledge beyond the present.
3. 313Homer honours Calchas for knowing past and future, and makes Zeus rule because he is eldest and knows most; the gods are minds.
4. 314Zeus rules by superior wisdom; knowledge makes the wise akin to God; all things in the cosmos are signs written like letters in a book.
5. 315The wise read the future in stars, entrails, birds and chance tokens, for in a sympathetic cosmos everything signifies everything else.
6. 316Magic works through the sympathy of the cosmos's parts, like pain passing through the body or strings resonating; the world is a harmony of opposites.
7. 317Divination and magic work only within the cosmos; the divine mind beyond it cannot be charmed.
8. 318Synesius sets aside religious rites, as the law requires, and turns to dream divination, whose obscurity it shares with Apollo's oracles.
9. 319The soul contains the forms of all that comes to be and projects some onto the imagination, which has its own inner senses.
10. 320Through dream-imagination people meet the gods, find treasures, become poets, are healed, and may even rise to the highest vision.
11. 321The Chaldaean Oracles confirm that some receive divine light by teaching and others in sleep.
12. 322The oracle shows dream-learning is real attainment; the learned who scorn dreams as too common prefer arts the oracles reject.
13. 323The greatest goods, like the sun, are common to all; the imaginative spirit is the soul's first body and the true sense behind all the senses.
14. 324Inner sense is more divine than the outward organs, and the eye too deceives; a diseased imagination gives unclear dreams.
15. 325The imaginative spirit, the soul's vehicle, is purified or thickened as the soul grows better or worse; it is a borderland between reason and unreason.
16. 326The imaginative spirit spans all levels of being, from animals, where it is their reason, to daemons, whose whole being is imaginal.
17. 327Few rise above imagination; the soul's spirit can become god, daemon or phantom, and in it the soul is punished after death.
18. 328The soul's spirit, purified and dried, rises; made thick and moist, it sinks underground, but may rise again through purification and later lives.
19. 329The soul takes this spirit as a vessel from the heavenly spheres and must strive to bring it back up, or at least not sink with it.
20. 330The Chaldaean Oracles warn the soul not to sink into dark Hades; the worst evil is not to feel one's own degradation.
21. 331Repentance and the will drive purification; suffering loosens the soul's attachment to the world and reveals providence to the wise.
22. 332Worldly good fortune is a trap: the soul, hired to serve the cosmos, is seduced by matter like a hired man by a maidservant, and signs itself into slavery.
23. 333Matter pursues the escaping soul like a runaway slave; with God's help it must endure trials like Heracles, or be dragged back and punished.
24. 334Homer's two jars of Zeus figure the two portions of matter; the soul's spirit lives in the middle and sinks with a downward-turned soul.
25. 335The Oracles promise that even the soul's phantom, its subtle body of fire and air, may rise with it to the region of light.
26. 336If the lower spirit obeys the soul, it too may be purified and rise with it; the heavenly part of the soul's body certainly ascends.
27. 337Between the extremes of light and darkness lie many regions; the purer the spirit, the truer its visions; the fallen spirit sees falsely.
28. 338Those sunk in matter are deceived by spirits posing as gods; a pure imagination that sees truly awake and asleep promises a better lot.
29. 339Nourish the imaginative spirit with intellectual attention, which refines it and draws in a divine spirit; a thickened spirit leaves room for an evil one.
30. 340Dream divination is useful, but its greater fruit is the soul's ascent; seeking prophetic dreams leads people to sober food and a chaste bed.
31. 341Seeking prophetic dreams can lead people to love and union with God; the soul joined to God sees earthly things even more clearly from above.
32. 342Dream divination needs no journey to an oracle, only clean hands and prayer before sleep; it is open to the poor as to the rich.
33. 343Other forms of divination need costly rare ingredients; dreams come to rich and poor, citizen and slave alike.
34. 344Dreams cost no time, coming in sleep we must take anyway; other divination demands cumbersome equipment and takes over life.
35. 345Compelling the gods by magic is impious and has been exposed by the laws; dream divination travels with each person and no law can forbid it.
36. 346No tyrant can forbid dreams; they are open to all and serve as prophet and counsellor, announcing good and warning of evil.
37. 347Hope, Prometheus's gift, keeps people alive; even a prisoner can dream himself a general, for waking hope and dreams arise in the same imagination.
38. 348Waking hope consoles but deceives; hope given in sleep is God's pledge and prepares us for coming events, the hope Pindar praised.
39. 349Penelope's two gates of dreams reflect her ignorance; the dream of the eagle she disbelieved came true with Odysseus in her house.
40. 350Agamemnon's dream did not deceive him: it promised victory only if the whole army fought, and Achilles' men were absent.
41. 351Dreams have helped Synesius in philosophy and writing, supplying thoughts, words and corrections to his style.
42. 352Dreams corrected Synesius's overwrought style and guided his hunting, once foretelling a great catch.
43. 353During his embassy at court dreams saved Synesius from sorcerers' plots and gave him boldness before the emperor; clear dreams come to a soul withdrawn from the senses.
44. 354Clear dreams come to the virtuous; most dreams are riddles needing an art, for all things past, present and future shed images.
45. 355The imagination mirrors the images shed by things; images of the past and present are clear, those of the future dim and riddling, so they need interpretation.
46. 356The best preparation for true dreams is philosophic calm and a temperate diet; for those who cannot achieve this, Synesius proposes an art of interpreting images.
47. 357Dream images are signs learned by experience, like a sailor's landmark or a halo round the moon foretelling a storm.
48. 358As perception leads to memory, experience and art, so an art of dreams can be built from observation.
49. 359General dream-books are useless, because each person's imaginative spirit differs by origin, as souls come from different spheres.
50. 360Each soul has its own star; souls defiled by matter carry a diseased spirit, so the same images cannot mean the same for everyone.
51. 361Dream-book writers made their own imagination the rule for all, like ignoring the difference between straight and distorted mirrors.
52. 362Each person must build his own art by recording his dreams and their outcomes, keeping "night-books" beside his day-books.
53. 363A dream journal aids the art of interpretation, is a pleasant self-history, and is the richest exercise in style.
54. 364To describe dreams in words, where impossible things are joined and named things vanish, would demand the most perfect rhetoric.
55. 365Dreams move us powerfully, mixing love, hate and pleasure, and even dreams within dreams; only vivid words could convey them.
56. 366In dreams one flies past eagles to the spheres, speaks with stars and sees the gods, leaping without passing through what lies between.
57. 367Fables, where animals speak, borrow their freedom from dreams; writing dreams would crown rhetorical training and sharpen judgment.
58. 368Writing dreams would suit rhetors better than declamations on fictitious cases, which even bearded philosophers argue with absurd passion.
59. 369Declaimers mistake practice for the goal, speaking much with nothing to say; Alcaeus and Archilochus wrote of their own lives and are remembered.
60. 370Homer and Stesichorus glorified others and are themselves unknown; whoever seeks lasting fame should write of his own life and dreams and trust to time.