from unsound sleep.
Another friend lately dreamed, one Thursday night, that he saw an acquaintance of his thrown from his horse; and that he was lying on the ground with the blood streaming from his face, which was much cut. He mentioned his dream in the morning, and being an entire disbeliever in such phenomena, he could not account for the impression made on his mind. This was so strong, that on Saturday, he could not forbear calling at his friend’s house; who, he was told, was in bed, having been thrown from his horse on the previous day, and much injured about the face.
Relations of this description having been more or less familiar to the world in all times and places, and the recurrence of the phenomena too frequent to admit of their reality being disputed, various theories were promulgated to account for them; and indeed, there scarcely seems to be a philosopher or historian among the Greeks and Romans who does not make some allusion to this ill-understood department of nature; while, among the eastern nations, the faith in such mysterious revelations remains even yet undiminished. Spirits, good and evil, or the divinities of the heathen mythology, were generally called in to remove the difficulty; though some philosophers, rejecting this supernatural interference, sought the explanation in merely physical causes.
In the druidical rites of the northern nations, women bore a considerable part: there were priestesses, who gave forth oracles and prophecies, much after the manner of the Pythonesses of the Grecian temples, and no doubt drawing their inspiration from the same sources; namely, from the influences of magnetism, and from narcotics. When the pure rites of Christianity seperseded the heathen forms of worship, tradition kept alive the memory of these vaticinations, together with some of the arcana of the druidical groves; and hence, in the middle ages, arose the race of so-called witches and sorcerers, who were partly impostors, and partly self-deluded. Nobody thought of seeking the explanation of the facts they witnessed in natural causes; what had formerly been attributed to the influence of the gods, was now attributed to the influence of the devil; and a league with Satan was the universal solvent of all difficulties.
Persecution followed, of course; and men, women, and children, were offered up to the demon of superstition, till the candid and rational part of mankind, taking fright at the holocaust, began to put in their protest, and lead out a reaction, which, like all reactions, ran right into the opposite extreme. From believing everything, they ceased to believe anything; and, after swallowing unhesitatingly the most monstrous absurdities, they relieved themselves of the whole difficulty, by denying the plainest facts; while what it was found impossible to deny, was referred to imagination—that most abused word, which explained nothing, but left the matter as obscure as it was before. Man’s spiritual nature was forgotten; and what the senses could not apprehend, nor the understanding account for, was pronounced to be impossible. Thank God! we have lived through that age, and in spite of the struggles of the materialistic school, we are fast advancing to a better. The traditions of the saints who suffered the most appalling tortures, and slept or smiled the while, can scarcely be rejected now, when we are daily hearing of people undergoing frightful operations, either in a state of insensibility, or while they believe themselves revelling in delight; nor can the psychological intimations which these facts offer, be much longer overlooked. One revelation must lead to another; and the wise men of the world will, ere long, be obliged to give in their adherence to Shakspere’s much quoted axiom, and confess that “there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in their philosophy.”
CHAPTER IV.
ALLEGORICAL DREAMS, PRESENTIMENT, ETC.
It has been the opinion of many philosophers, both ancient and modern, that in the original state of man, as he came forth from the hands of his Creator, that knowledge which is now acquired by pains and labor was intuitive. His material body was given him for the purpose of placing him in relation with the material world, and his sensuous organs for the perception of material objects, but his soul was a mirror of the universe, in which everything was reflected, and, probably, is so still, but that the spirit is no longer in a condition to perceive it. Degraded in his nature, and distracted by the multiplicity of the objects and interests that surround him, man has lost his faculty of spiritual seeing; but in sleep, when the body is in a state of passivity, and external objects are excluded from us by the shutting up of the senses through which we perceive them, the spirit, to a certain degree freed from its impediments, may enjoy somewhat of its original privilege. “The soul, which is designed as the mirror of a superior spiritual order” (to which it belongs), still receives in dreams, some rays from above, and enjoys a foretaste of its future condition; and, whatever interpretation may be put upon the history of the Fall, few will doubt that, before it, man must have stood in a much more intimate relation to his Creator than he has done since. If we admit this, and that, for the above-hinted reasons, the soul in sleep may be able to exercise somewhat of its original endowment, the possibility of what is called prophetic dreaming may be better understood.
“Seeing in dreams,” says Ennemoser, “is a self-illumining of things, places, and times;” for relations of time and space form no obstruction to the dreamer: things, near and far, are alike seen in the mirror of the soul, according to the connection in which they stand to each other; and, as the future is but an unfolding of the present, as the present is of the past, one being necessarily involved in the other, it is not more difficult to the untrammelled spirit to see what is to happen, than what has already happened. Under what peculiar circumstances it is that the body and soul fall into this particular relative condition, we do not know, but that certain families and constitutions are more prone to these conditions than others, all experience goes to establish. According to the theory of Dr. Ennemoser, we should conclude that they are more susceptible to magnetic influences, and that the body falls into a more complete state of negative polarity.
In the histories of the Old Testament we constantly find instances of prophetic dreaming, and the voice of God was chiefly heard by the prophets in sleep; seeming to establish that man is in that state more susceptible of spiritual communion, although the being thus made the special organ of the Divine will, is altogether a different thing from the mere disfranchisement of the embodied spirit in ordinary cases of clear seeing in sleep. Profane history, also, furnishes us with various instances of prophetic dreaming, which it is unnecessary for me to refer to here. But there is one thing very worthy of remark, namely, that the allegorical character of many of the dreams recorded in the Old Testament, occasionally pervades those of the present day. I have heard of several of this nature, and Oberlin, the good pastor of Ban de la Roche, was so subject to them, that he fancied he had acquired the art of interpreting the symbols. This characteristic of dreaming is in strict conformity with the language of the Old Testament, and of the most ancient nations. Poets and prophets, heathen and Christian, alike express themselves symbolically, and, if we believe that this language prevailed in the early ages of the world, before the external and intellectual life had predominated over the instinctive and emotional, we must conclude it to be the natural language of man, who must, therefore, have been gifted with a conformable faculty of comprehending these hieroglyphics; and hence it arose that the interpreting of dreams became a legitimate art. Long after these instinctive faculties were lost, or rather obscured, by the turmoil and distractions of sensuous life, the memories and traditions of them remained, and hence the superstructure of jugglery and imposture that ensued, of which the gipsies form a signal example, in whom, however, there can be no doubt that some occasional gleams of this original endowment may still be found, as is the case, though more rarely, in individuals of all races and conditions. The whole of nature is one large book of symbols, which, because we have lost the key to it, we can not decipher. “To the first man,” says Hamann, “whatever his ear heard, his eye saw, or his hand touched, was a living word; with this word in his heart and in his mouth, the formation of language was easy. Man saw things in their essence and properties, and named them accordingly.”
There can be no doubt that the heathen forms of worship and