“Immur’d within the silent bower of sleep,
Two portals firm the various phantoms keep:
Of iv’ry one, whence flit, to mock the brain,
Of winged lies a light fantastic train.
The gate oppos’d, pellucid valves adorn,
And columns fair incased with polish’d horn;
Where images of truth for passage wait,
With visions manifest of future fate.”
And Virgil’s is a close copy.
In the “City of Dreams,” of Lucian, the blasphemer (whose beauties are
stained by their impieties), these eternal gates are again alluded to.
But the dreams in this city are all deceivers; for when a mortal enters
the gates, a circle of domestic dreams in a moment unfold to him a
budget of intelligence, which proves to be a tissue of lies.
Tertullian, and many others, have argued the notion of a _special
purpose_ of the Deity in _every dream_. And the “New Moral World” of the
visionary Owen, asserts, that “one chief source of our knowledge is
dreams and omens.”
In the eras of inspiration, few will be sceptical enough to doubt the
occurrence of divine mediations; or not to believe, with Socrates, and
other sages, in the divine origin of dreams and omens.
The evidence of Holy Scripture again proves the _occasion_, indeed the
_necessity_, for such communication; but, in our own time, I deem it
little less than profaneness, to imagine that the Deity should indicate
the future occurrence of common-place and trivial incidents through the
medium of an organ, confessedly in a state of _imperfection_, at the
moment when the faculties of mind are returning from a state of
temporary suspension,—a death-like sleep.
Even John Wesley believed dreams to be “_doubtful_ and _disputable_;”
and adds, with a half-profanation,—“they _might_ be from God, or might
not.”
The Emperor Constantine, you know, denounced death to all who dared to
look seriously into the secrets of futurity.
When we reflect that the proportion of events, seemingly the fulfilment
of a dream, is to the myriads of forebodings which never come to pass
(as the dreams recorded with some solemnity by Herodotus, of Alcibiades;
of Crœsus, regarding his son Atys; of Astyages and the vine; of
Cambyses, respecting Smerdis; and of Hamilcar, at the siege of
Syracusa;) as a drop in the ocean, the fallacy of the doctrine must be
evident. I marvel much that credulity, in this reflecting age, can gain
a single proselyte.
The magi of Persia and the soothsayers of Greece and Rome were
_constantly in error_; and Artemidorus Miraldus, who in the reign of
Antoninus wrote his voluminous book “Oneirocriticus,” has given us the
most ridiculous interpretations.
When the pagan priesthood of old lay down on the reeking skins of their
victims to rouse the inspiration of their dreams, it was to cheat their
proselytes. Such were the mummeries in the Temple of Æsculapius. The
devotees were first purified by the “lustral water;” and then divine
visions came over them, and priestesses in snowy robes, and a venerable
priest in the habit of Æsculapius, paraded round the altar, and the
charm was complete.
You may learn from Martin something about the modern influence of such a
charm.
“Mr. Alexander Cooper, present minister of North-uist, told me that one
John Erach, in the Isle of Lewis, assured him that it was his fate to
have been led by his curiosity to some who consulted this oracle, and
that he was a night within the hide as above mentioned, during which
time he felt and heard such terrible things that he could not express
them; the impression it made on him was such as could never go off, and
he said for a thousand worlds he would never again be concerned in the
like performance, for this had disordered him to a high degree. He
confessed it ingenuously and with an air of great remorse, and seemed to
be very penitent under a just sense of so great a crime: he declared
this about five years since, and is still living in the Lewis for any
thing I know.”
In imitation of this spell for the divine inspiration of a dream, the
modern Franciscans, after the ceremony of mass, throw themselves on mats
already consecrated by the slumber of some holy visionary, and with all
this foolery, they vaunt the divine inspiration of _their_ dream.
Cicero, and Theophrastus, and many other sages, were sceptical of these
special visitations, and explained _rationally_ dreams and divinations,
as Cicero his dream at Ætina, on his flight from Rome.