He declares himself inclined to all vices--wine, gaming, lying, licentiousness, envy, cunning, deception, calumny, inconstancy; he observes that four times during the full moon he found himself in a state of real mental alienation. His sensibility was so perverted, that he never felt comfortable except under the stimulus of some physical pain; and in the absence of natural pain, he procured it by artificial means, biting his lips or arms until he fetched blood. “I sought causes of pain to enjoy the pleasure of the cessation of pain, and because I perceived that when I did not suffer I fell into so grave and troublesome a condition, that it was worse than any pain.” This fact helps us to understand many strange tortures which madmen have voluptuously imposed on themselves.[166] He had so blind a faith in the revelations of dreams, that he printed a strange work _De Somniis_, conducted his medical consultations, concluded his marriage, and began his works (for example, that on the _Varietà delle Cose_ and _Sulle Febbri_) in accordance with dreams.[167] He was impotent up to the age of thirty-four. Virility was given to him in a dream, and to this gift was added, not altogether happily, the cause of his troubles--his future wife, a brigand’s daughter, whom, before this dream, as he asserts, he had never even seen. His unhappy mania even led him to regulate his medical consultations according to his dreams, as he himself boasts of doing in the case of Borromeo’s son. It is possible to cite other examples, sometimes comic, sometimes strange or terrible. I will quote one which unites all these characters: his dream of the jewel.