The preface goes on to justify the study of dreams on the ground that “the most ancient Magi and perfect physicians” thereby adjudged to each man health and sickness, life and death. “Medicine and divine thoughts, dreams, visions, or oracles are not prohibited, but demoniacal incantations, sorcery, lot-castings, insomnia, and vain phantasms are condemned that you may not readily trust in them.”[942] No doctrine is to be spurned wholesale, but only what is vicious in it. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego excelled all the Magi and soothsayers of the Chaldeans. Our author explains that among the Chaldeans then as today learning consisted not of the philosophy and sophistry of the Greeks and Latins, but of astronomy and interpretations of dreams. He alludes to a prayer of seven verses which they repeat when going to bed in order to receive responses in dreams. They pay little heed to the superficial meaning of their dreams, but by examining the inner meaning they learn either past or future. The author exhorts the person to whom he addresses the preface to do the same, laying aside all terrors that dreams may arouse in him. He points out that interpretation of dreams has Biblical sanction and that Joseph, Daniel, and Marduch all profited thereby. [Sidenote: Sources of the present treatise.] As for the present treatise, it is collected from divine and human scripture, based upon experience as well as reason, and drawn from Latins, Greeks, Persians, and the annals of Pharaoh and Nebuchadnezzar in which many of their dreams are recorded, for they were both lovers of the future and, since they had no philosophers like the Gentiles, God allowed them as a compensation to foresee the future in dreams. For by dreams life and death, poverty and riches, sickness and health, sorrow and joy, flight and victory, are known more easily than through astrology, a more difficult and manifold art.[943] But lest his introduction grow too long, the author at this point ends it and begins the text proper. [Sidenote: Demoniac and natural causes of dreams.]