animal produce as butter, cheese, eggs, and milk. That the influence
of fasting and of sober fare upon the perspicacity of the sleeping
brain was known to the ancients in times when dreams were far more
highly esteemed than they now are, appears evident from various
passages in the records of theurgy and mysticism. Philostratus,
in his "Life of Apollonius Tyaneus," represents the latter as informing
King Phraotes that "the Oneiropolists, or Interpreters of Visions,
are wont never to interpret any vision till they have first inquired
the time at which it befell; for, if it were early, and of the
morning sleep, they then thought that they might make a good
interpretation thereof (that is, that it might be worth the
interpreting), in that the soul was then fitted for divination,
and disencumbered. But if in the first sleep, or near midnight,
while the soul was as yet clouded and drowned in libations, they,
being wise, refused to give any interpretation. Moreover, the gods
themselves are of this opinion, and send their oracles only into
abstinent minds. For the priests, taking him who doth so consult,
keep him one day from meat and three days from wine, that he may
in a clear soul receive the oracles." And again, Iamblichus, writing
to Agathocles, says:--"There is nothing unworthy of belief in what
you have been told concerning the sacred sleep, and seeing by means
of dreams. I explain it thus:--The soul has a twofold life, a lower
and a higher. In sleep the soul is liberated from the constraint
of the body, and enters, as an emancipated being, on its divine
life of intelligence. Then, as the noble faculty which beholds
objects that truly are--the objects in the world of intelligence--
stirs within, and awakens to its power, who can be astonished that
the mind which contains in itself the principles of all events,
should, in this its state of liberation, discern the future in those
antecedent principles which will constitute that future? The nobler
part of the mind is thus united by abstraction to higher natures,
and becomes a participant in the wisdom and foreknowledge of the
gods . . . . The night-time of the body is the day-time of the soul."
But I have no desire to multiply citations, nor to vex the reader
with hypotheses inappropriate to the design of this little work.
Having, therefore, briefly recounted the facts and circumstances
of my experience so far as they are known to myself, I proceed,
without further commentary, to unroll my chart of dream-pictures,
and leave them to tell their own tale.
--A.B.K.
I. The Doomed Train*
I was visited last night by a dream of so strange and vivid a kind
that I feel impelled to communicate it to you, not only to relieve
my own mind of the impression which the recollection of it causes me,
but also to give you an opportunity of finding the meaning, which
I am sill far too much shaken and terrified to seek for myself.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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