10,000 Dreams Interpreted | Page 4

for help. The dreamer awoke; but, thinking the matter unworthy of notice, went to sleep again. The second time he dreamed his friend appeared, saying it would be too late, for he had already been murdered and his body hid in a cart, under manure. The cart was afterward sought for and the body found. Cicero also wrote, ``If the gods love men they will certainly disclose their purposes to them in sleep.''
Chrysippus wrote a volume on dreams as divine portent. He refers to the skilled interpretations of dreams as a true divination; but adds that, like all other arts in which men have to proceed on conjecture and on artificial rules, it is not infallible.
Plato concurred in the general idea prevailing in his day, that there were divine manifestations to the soul in sleep. Condorcet thought and wrote with greater fluency in his dreams than in waking life.
Tartini, a distinguished violinist, composed his ``Devil's Sonata'' under the inspiration of a dream. Coleridge, through dream influence, composed his ``Kubla Khan.''
The writers of Greek and Latin classics relate many instances of dream experiences. Homer accorded to some dreams divine origin. During the third and fourth centuries, the supernatural origin of dreams was so generally accepted that the fathers, relying upon the classics and the Bible as authority, made this belief a doctrine of the Christian Church.
Synesius placed dreaming above all methods of divining the future; he thought it the surest, and open to the poor and rich alike.
Aristotle wrote: ``There is a divination concerning some things in dreams not incredible.'' Camille Flammarion, in his great book on ``Premonitory Dreams and Divination of the Future,'' says: ``I do not hesitate to affirm at the outset that occurrence of dreams foretelling future events with accuracy must be accepted as certain.''
Joan of Arc predicted her death.
Cazotte, the French philosopher and transcendentalist, warned Condorcet against the manner of his death.
People dream now, the same as they did in medieval and ancient times.
The following excerpt from ``The Unknown,''[1] a recent book by Flammarion, the French astronomer, supplemented with a few of my own thoughts and collections, will answer the purposes intended for this book.
[1] ``From `The Unknown.' Published by Harper & Brothers Copyright, 1900, by Camille Flammarion.''
``We may see without eyes and hear without ears, not by unnatural excitement of our sense of vision or of hearing, for these accounts prove the contrary, but by some interior sense, psychic and mental.
``The soul, by its interior vision, may see not only what is passing at a great distance, but it may also know in advance what is to happen in the future. The future exists potentially, determined by causes which bring to pass successive events.
``POSITIVE OBSERVATION PROVES THE EXISTENCE OF A PSYCHIC WORLD, as real as the world known to our physical senses.
``And now, because the soul acts at a distance by some power that belongs to it, are we authorized to conclude that it exists as something real, and that it is not the result of functions of the brain?
``Does light really exist?
``Does heat exist?
``Does sound exist?
``No.
``They are only manifestations produced by movement.
``What we call light is a sensation produced upon our optic nerve by the vibrations of ether, comprising between 400 and 756 trillions per second, undulations that are themselves very obscure.
``What we call heat is a sensation produced by vibrations between 350 and and{sic} 600 trillions.
``The sun lights up space, as much at midnight as at midday. Its temperature is nearly 270 degrees below zero.
``What we call sound is a sensation produced upon our auditory nerve by silent vibrations of the air, themselves comprising between 32,000 and 36,000 a second.
. . . . . .
``Very many scientific terms represent only results, not causes. ``The soul may be in the same case.
``The observations given in this work, the sensations, the impressions, the visions, things heard, etc., may indicate physical effects produced without the brain.
``Yes, no doubt, but it does not seem so.
``Let us examine one instance.
``Turn back to page 156.@@@
``A young woman, adored by her husband, dies at Moscow. Her father-in-law, at Pulkowo, near St. Petersburg, saw her that same hour by his side. She walked with him along the street; then she disappeared. Surprised, startled, and terrified, he telegraphed to his son, and learned both the sickness and the death of his daughter-in-law.
``We are absolutely obliged to admit that SOMETHING emanated from the dying woman and touched her father-in-law. This thing unknown may have been an ethereal movement, as in the case of light, and may have been only an effect, a product, a result; but this effect must have had a cause, and this cause evidently proceeded from the woman who was dying. Can the constitution of the brain explain this projection? I do not think that any anatomist or physiologist will give