Yet civilization in the south has ever held its few seekers after the old dreams and ideals, and the teachings of these rare spirits, whether pagan or Christian, were to loom large in future thought. Plotinus, founder of the school of neo-Platonists, and his pupils, Iamblichus, Porphyry and Proclus, united and revived the doctrines of Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle. Plotinus, who lived in the third century during the reign of Alexander Severus, not only persuaded the Emperor to many deeds of clemency and kindness, but he is said to have inspired Alexander's treatise upon dreams and divination. The influence of Plotinus was not, however, confined to followers of the pagan deities. The Greek fathers, Basil, Clement and Gregory, and, at a later date, Saint Augustine, and still later the mediaeval mystics, Anselm and Hugh de Lorraine, absorbed largely of the teachings of Plotinus upon dreams and other occult subjects. These Christians were, to be sure, of the elect and understanding few; Plotinus was generally held in horror by the followers of orthodox Christianity, who consigned him to oblivion as soon as might be. Here he remained, save for an occasional plagiarist, until the twentieth century restored him to his own.

In the second century Artemidorus compiled a dream book. His claim of having been aided in the work by Apollo Daldia-nus probably accounts for the obloquy that succeeding generations have cast upon his name. However, his dream dictionary, in four volumes, forms the basis of dream interpretation and symbolism of the present day.

Synesius, the paradoxical pagan bishop of the fourth century, whose manful defense of Cyrenaica and Ptolemais when those cities were besieged by barbarians, adds a touch of quaint-ness to his history, wrote a treatise upon dreams entitled "De Insomnis." Before he became a Christian he was a pupil of Hypatia. His recipes for creating dreams are preserved in the Leyden Papyri.

Ambrose, the saintly Bishop of Milan, wrote a treatise on dreams in which he testifies as to the fulfillment in every detail of a dream in which he was commanded to open the earth at a certain spot and to exhume the bodies of two martyrs, dead two hundred years. He found the bodies and obeyed the command to bury them with Christian rites.

The clear vision of the few, however, failed to lighten the blindness of the world, and the majority of thoughts and dreams must follow the outward trend of events.

Despite the barbarity of the rising nations that were to rule the world after the fall of Rome, early Christianity gathered strength therefrom, and the invigoration developed a certain ferocious fervor not altogether congruous with the spirit of the Founder of the Faith. The first compulsory conversions to Christianity, under Charlemagne in the eighth century, blazed the path for future persecutions. The din and clamor of clashing faiths sent mystics and dreamers to seek the silence of the deserts of Arabia and of Africa, where the cenobites and hermits might dream in peace and keep alive the Spirit of the Master.

The expulsion of the Druids, who were compelled to hold their meetings beneath the trees at night, founded the legend of the Witches Sabbath, the nightmare of the Middle Ages.

The legends of King Arthur's Court and of the Quest of the Grail were but visions, dreams higher than the dreamers knew, and the mental progenitors of the Crusades.

The inception of the Crusades was a visionary's dream, and the end a nightmare. The barons and princes who dreamed of following the footsteps of the Saviour and of regaining the Holy Sepulchre for Christianity, found a rude awakening at the hands of the Saracens. Their return filled Europe with broken lives. The legend of vampirism is scientifically traceable to nightmare induced by physical, leprous conditions. The peasantry, neglected and starving during the absence of landowners in the Holy Land, were fit subjects for infection, and thus the nightmare of the vampire grew and spread. To the fancy distorted by disease fairies became witches, religion bigotry; all things bright, happy, or wholesome, were forgotten by a tortured world; God Himself became personified Revenge. Mawkish sentimentality, strongly flavored with Oriental sensualism, confined the women to castles. They were permitted wings, but denied nether limbs, a relegation scarcely conducive to health or happiness. The sterility of the moyen age resulted and its very mysticism was perverted in its dreaming. The pietistic imagination dwelt ravenously upon bodily agony, the marks of the stigmata, physical temptations and hysteria. Witches and sorcerers, the dream manufacturers and hypnotists of that day, flourished apace, until in sheer reaction the Renaissance robbed dreams of their morbid significance and left them empty visions by declaring that they held no meaning whatsoever. Materialistic joys now put a suffering world to shame; there were no more portentous dreams, no more Witches Sabbaths; God not only ceased to appear Himself, but would not permit Satan to do so. An era of practicality followed: utilitarianism, the sciences of mathematics and medicine buried traditions, dreams and abstract truths without partiality. Then, suddenly, a new science came to the fore and resuscitated not only truths that had heretofore been challenged, but symbols, traditions and dreams.

She came as a clean-cut, clear-eyed creature whose practical tolerance silenced anaemic orthodoxy, while the sturdy commonsense of her raiment was in absurd contrast to the rainbow wings of ancient faith. The knowledge that the dreams and visions of the world had been driven from the realm of fact by her grandparents, the eighteenth ceataarj sciences, only stimulated her interest in the banished legends.

With a laugh she unearthed the dreams of past ages and resurrected their accompanying faith. Myths, gods and heroes were likewise revived and with their return to earth were accepted as psychological entities. Dreams were investigated, recorded and labeled with their classification, origin and pedigree. Symbols to which ancestral memory had always clung were recognized and accepted.