Dreams
The occult significance of dreams was a matter of speculation among the wise at an early period in the history of civilisation. In the articles upon Babylonia and Egypt we have to some extent outlined the methods by which the wise men of those countries divined the future from visions seen in sleep, and to these we must refer the reader, as well as to the articles dealing with other countries, savage and civilised, where he will discover a good deal of data relating to dreams and dream-lore. In this place we can only indicate some of the more outstanding theories of antiquity regarding the nature and causes of dreams and the manner in which the ancient diviners generally interpreted them. Dreams were regarded as of two kinds-false and true, in either case emanating from a supernatural intelligence, evil or good. By the ancients sleep was regarded as a second life, in which the soul was freed from the body and therefore much more active than during the waking state. The acts it observed and the scenes through which it passed were thought to have a bearing on the future life of the dreamer, but it is possible that the dream-life was regarded as supernatural and "inverted," and that the events which the bodiless spirit beheld were the opposites of those which would later occur on the earth-plane. The idea thus originated that "dreams go by contraries," as both popular belief and the many treatises upon the subject of nightly visions assure us is the case. Dreams
However the belief in the divinatory character of dreams arose, there is every proof that their causes and nature exercised some of the greatest minds of antiquity. Aristotle believed them to arise solely from natural causes. Posidonius the Stoic was of the opinion that they were of three kinds, the first automatic, and coming from the clear sight of the soul, the second from spirits and the third from God. Cratippus, Democritus, and Pythagoras held doctrines almost identical or differing only in detail, Later, Macrobius divided dreams into five kinds: the dream, the vision, the ocular dream, the insomnium and the phantasm. The first is a figurative and mysterious representation which requires an interpretation; the second was an exact representation of a future event in sleep; the third was a dream representing some priest or divinity, who declared to the sleeper things to come; the fourth was an ordinary dream not deserving of attention, and the fifth was a disturbed half-awake dream, a species of nightmare. Other writers divide dreams into accidental dreams and those which were induced for the purposes of divination. We are told by Herodotus that in the temple of Bel in Babylon a priestess lay on a bed ready to dream visions of the second class, and that the beds of such soothsayers were often made of the skin of a ram is well known. The ancient Hebrews obtained such dreams by sleeping among tombs, and this especial gateway to the supernatural world seems to have been, and still is known to the majority of nations, barbarous and the reverse, as intimately as hypnotic and other methods of reaching its planes and hearing its pronouncements.
Sleep was, of course, often induced by drugs, whether the soma of the Hindoos, the peyollotl of the ancient Mexicans, the haschish of the Arabs, or the opium of the Malays or Chinese, and these narcotics which have the property of inducing speedy sleep and of heightening inward vision were and are greatly prized by professional dreamers all over the world, especially as they rendered dreaming almost immediately possible.
With the nature of ecstatic vision we have dealt under the heading of Hypnotism and now that we have outlined the older theories regarding the cause and nature of dreams (for with the modern and purely physiological theories on the subject we have no concern in this place), we may pass on to consider the methods by which dreams were read or divined. As has been remarked, this was generally undertaken by a special class of diviners, who in ancient Greece were known as Oneiocritikoi, or interpreters of dreams. The first treatise on the subject is that of Artemidorus, who lived in the time of Antoninus Pius. He differentiates between the dreams of Kings and those of commoners, as he believes that the visions of royalty must have reference to the commonwealth and not to the individual. Dreams which represent something as happening to the individual who dreams them, show that they have a personal significance, whereas if the dream relates to another it will concern him alone. He details the numerous species of dreams throughout five books, and then adduces numerous examples. Neither for rule nor illustration have we any space here, and indeed, the literature, popular and otherwise, which treats of oneiromancy is so extensive and so readily accessible that no necessity arises for so doing. Suffice it to say that the rules of Artemidorus are far from clear, and according to them, any dream might signify any event, and any interpretation of the same might be considered justifiable. The method of testing dreams according to Amyraldus is his Discours sur les Songes divins (Saumur, 1625) is whether the instructions and advice that they contain make for good or ill-a test it is impossible to apply until after the result is known. But Amyraldus surmounts this difficulty by proposing to test dreams by the evidence they show of divine knowledge-by asking oneself in short, whether the dream it was desired to examine gave any evidence of such things as God alone could know. It would seem from an examination of such dreams as were submitted to the diviners of antiquity that the symbolism they exhibited was of a character so profound that it could only be unriddled by an interpreter who received divine aid, such as was afforded in the case of Moses or Daniel. It is plain, however, that the most farfetched interpretations were given to many of the most epoch-making dreams of antiquity, and indeed, the oneiocritical system is one of the weakest spots in the armour of occult science, and was the first of its departments to fall into disrepute and become the prey of the charlatan. There are not wanting serious students of the occult who doubt entirely the occult significance of dreams, and it must be granted that no good reason exists for classing them generally with the vision, or a condition of second sight or ecstasy. See H. Hutchinson, Dreams and their Meanings, London, 1901; J. C. Colquohoun, Magic, Witchcraft and Animal Magnetism, London, 1851; H.
Christmas, The Cradle of the Twin Giants, London, 1849, and many other popular and more advanced handbooks on the subject.