man's Counsellor," published in London in 1633, says that, "To dreame of eagles flying over our heads, to dreame of marriages, dancing and banquetting, foretells some of our kinsfolk are departed; to dreame of silver, if thou hast it given to thyself, sorrow; of gold, good fortune; to lose an axle tooth or an eye, the death of some friend; to dreame of bloody teeth the death of the dreamer"; and so on. And these readings are modeled on interpretations commonly believed in Europe, and anterior to printed dream books. In various parts of Europe, they believe that to dream of little pigs is fortunate; bullocks, unfortunate; a house on fire means news from a far country; vermin means sickness in the family; serpents, friends will turn out to bitter enemies; and there is no better dream than of wallowing up to your neck in mud.* Clear waters means sorrow; running naked in the streets, troubles and perplexity. In England, the oak means long life and prosperity; in Switzerland, calamity. Stripping the bark off a tree means loss of character to a maiden, family bereavement to a mother, a rich legacy to a man. Anemones mean love; bilberries, an excursion; broom, a baby; lilies, joy; water-lilies, danger from the sea; lemons, separation; violets; bad luck to the single, good luck to the married, * Mackay's "Memories of Extraordinary Popular Delusions." yellow flowers, jealousy; daffodils, the good angel warns a maiden to beware of her lover; the advice neglected, "Never again shall she put garland on; Instead of it she'll wear sad cypress now, But the meanings are very capricious; an English girl will be lucky if she dreams of a rose, a Norman girl will be unlucky. Such is the decadence of the religious vision a mere mechanical omen, beloved by the ignorant and credulous. Dreams began by being real and obvious; they became real and not obvious; and last they became not real and not obvious: first they were self-explanatory; then they required explaining; last, they became mechanical omens, interpreted according to plan. The evolution of the dream theory up to this point may be marked in a single race in the history of the Jewish views of dreams. Originally, no doubt, the Jews understood dreams literally as sorties of the soul, with vivid excitements like those of the day, yet in some mysterious way unlike. Later, they accounted them supernatural visitations, or visions, some of them self-explanatory, and others enigmatic without the interpretation of seers. Dream interpreting became a profession-like medicine; and the Jews of Palestine and Babylon, during the first five centuries of the Christian era, consulted interpreters about their dreams as we consult doctors about our diseases, bad dreams being treated with a special fast. Dreamers could not perform their own interpretations, but only the feed interpreters and it was worth while to pay a good sum, as the dreams inevitably came true" according to the interpretation that was given. "A dream not interpreted," declared Hesda, a third-century Babylonian Jew, "is like a letter not read"; the standard fee in his day was one denarius, and there were twenty-four official interpreters in the city of Jerusalem. In the next stage of its development, the dream was a mere omen. If a superstitious Jew had a bad dream, he fasted next day to appease the ruler of dreams; but the Jews of Minsk, with a characteristic business cunning, had a recipe for avoiding the consequence, viz., to repeat the following charm, "God is master, The dream is a fool; Whatever I dream tonight, I will not fast tomorrow," so that the ruler of dreams would conclude it a waste of time to send them a bad one. It is still believed amongst certain of the Russian Jews, that dreams obtain their fulfilment according to the interpretation first given; from which is derived their proverb, "Don't tell your dream to a fool." The Eastern Jews have a dream book, (of which an edition was published at Brooklyn so recently as in 1902, translated into Yiddish from Almoli's "Pitron Halomot "Almoli lived in Constantinople), in which dreams are classified according to subjects, such as animals, plants, the dead, angels, and there is a fixed interpretation - an ox that gores the dreamer means long life, demons mean success in money affairs, a dead man carrying fruit means that he is in heaven- and falling through space means that he is driven out of heaven. The last stage is the skeptical and rational; wonder and awe yield place to materialistic investigation. Yet Dr. Henri Jung, one of the most advanced dream investigators of the present day writes in a recent book,* "We find to our astonishment that an apparently senseless dream is quite full of sense, and deals with extraordinarily important and serious problems of the soul. Having acquired this knowledge we cannot refrain from giving rather more credit to the old superstitions concerning the meaning of dreams for which our rationalizing tendencies, until lately, had no use." *"New Paths in Psychology." CHAPTER VI DREAMS AS THOUGHT "To dream is nothing else but to think sleeping." De Foe, Hist. Devil. 1726. "Those dreams that on the silent night intrude. Nor can they from infernal mansions rise; But all are mere productions of the brain, And fools consult interpreters in vain.” — Swift, “On Dreams.” THERE have always been, and it is probable that there always will be, those who believe in the supernatural origin of dreams; but there have been others, and their number has kept on increasing, who do not. The latter hold all manner of different views on the subject, but they have one thing in common: they consider dreams to be products of the brain, like thought and feeling; they are materialists satisfied that if everything about dreams were known, they would be found to be phenomena with assignable normal causes, operating according to universal laws. This is the "scientific" stage of dream theory. A child willingly believes in Father Christmas, who comes down the chimney and fills his stocking, but a grown-up man does not: he is materialistic enough |