46 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



tion. But at the outset it possessed something of the combined digni- 

 ties of religion and of science. Not only were the old dream-inter- 

 preters careful of the significance and results of individual dreams in 

 order to build up a body of doctrine, but they held that not every dream 

 contained in it a divine message; thus they would not condescend to 

 interpret dreams following on the drinking of wine, for only to the 

 temperate, they declared, do the gods reveal their secrets. The serious 

 and elaborate way in which the interpretation of dreams was dealt with 

 is well seen in the treatise on this subject by Artemidorus of Daldi, a 

 native of Ephesus, and contemporary of Marcus Aurelius. He divided 

 dreams into two classes of theorematic dreams, which come literally 

 true, and allegorical dreams. The first group may be said to corre- 

 spond to the modern group of prophetic, proleptic or prodromic dreams, 

 while the second group includes the symbolical dreams which have of 

 recent years again attracted attention. Synesius, who lived in the 

 fourth century and eventually became a Christian bishop without alto- 

 gether ceasing to be a Greek pagan, wrote a very notable treatise on 

 dreaming in which, with a genuinely Greek alertness of mind, he con- 

 trived to rationalize and almost to modernize the ancient doctrine of 

 dream s}Tnbolism. He admits that it is in their obscurity that the 

 truth of dreams resides and that we must not expect to find any general 

 rules in regard to dreams; no two people are alike, so that the same 

 dream can not have the same significance for every one, and we have 

 to find out the rules of our own dreams. He had himself (like Galen) 

 often been aided in his writings by his dreams, in this way getting his 

 ideas into order, improving his style, and receiving criticisms of extrava- 

 gant phrases. Once, too, in the days when he hunted, he invented a 

 trap as a result of a dream. Synesius declares that our attention to 

 divination by dreams is good on moral grounds alone. For he who 

 makes his bed a Delphian tripod will be careful to live a pure and noble 

 life. In that way he will reach an end higher than that he aimed at. 8 

 It seems to-day by no means improbable that, amid the absurdities 

 of this popular oneiromancy, there are some items of real significance. 

 Until recent years, however, the absurdities have frightened away the 

 scientific investigator. Almost the only investigator of the psychology 

 of dreaming who ventured to admit a real symbolism in the dream 

 world was Schemer, and his arguments were not usually accepted nor 



8 A translation of Synesius's " Treatise on Dreams " is given by Druon, 

 " (Euvres de Synesius," pp. 347 et seq. 



8 K. A. Schemer, "Das Leben des Traumes," 1861. In France Hervey de 

 Saint-Denis, in a remarkable anonymous work which I have not seen ("Les 

 Reves et les Moyens de les Diriger," p. 356, quoted by Vaschide and Pi6ron, 

 " Psychologie du Reve," p. 26), tentatively put forward a symbolic theory of 

 dreams, as a possible rival to the theory that permanent associations are set 

 up as the result of a first chance coincidence. " Do there exist," he asked, 



