It is worthy of notice, too, that the intimations and premonitions supposed to be given by dreams (it is not too much to speak of them as premonitions, for intimation of a man's spiritual or moral state surely does give solid grounds for forecasting his future action) are not confined to the spiritual or moral sphere. It has been deemed that they give intimations about his physical health, too, which are hidden both from the sufferer himself and from his advisers in his normal waking state. Thus, if a man shall dream himself to be suffering from an affection of the heart, say, or of the brain, it has been deemed that this gives rise to a reasonable expectation that he actually will be attacked by disease in the organ that he has dreamed to be affected; and this is not merely an opinion that prevailed at the date of the fantastic notions about dreams, when the most far fetched interpretations were put upon them, but even since the days that dreams have been considered with what we are now pleased to call an intelligent and scientific eye. A quasi - scientific explanation is given - to the effect that, as the body in sleep is more freed from the control of the reason, so it is the more sensitive to conditions affecting the nerves.

Thus, in certain experiments, the sleeper has been pricked by a pin and has dreamed that he was pierced by a spear (the same prickings do not always produce the same piercings, be it observed, but the dreamer does sometimes respond in this way, and this response is to be taken as typical of the facts on which the argument we are considering is based). In dreams, then, it sometimes happens that the body is affected by something that corresponds to hyper - aesthesia, and in these conditions it is not altogether impossible that it may feel and be conscious of the first slight attacks of incipient disease which would have passed unnoticed in the waking state, and may therefore fairly be taken as premonitions which would not have been received at all but for the intimation given during the dream. It is even possible that in something of a similar state of liability to moral temptation, the dreaming mind may be conscious of an evil impulse which would have had no effect on it in the waking state, and may conceivably be a forewarning of a weakening of the moral fibre, a growing liability to temptation of a certain kind, which would never have been suspected but for the hint given in the dream.

In both cases, fore - warned may be forearmed, and the dreamer who has received these hints may act upon them and strengthen either his moral or his physical nature, accordingly as one or the other is threatened, against the imminent attack. We may find, in fact, nature speaking to us in dreams, where the more primitive man (past the first phase of utter confusion of objective and subjective) conceived that the supernatural was speaking; and so fall into line with the general scheme of mental evolution which sees more and more clearly the forces of nature in phenomena where the earlier speculator saw supernatural forces.

Obviously, it is quite possible to widen out the argument we have been looking at until it ceases to have much practical force. A dream is perhaps more directly and immediately the result of what a man has eaten, drunk, or what he has been doing during the day; and it is possible to argue that, had he not been such and such a man as he was, he would not have eaten or drunk such and such things, and therefore would not have had such and such a dream, but this seems to be widening the argument to a degree that is not far short of fatuous, and makes it worth little attention.

It is evident that there are two divisions of the art that has to do with dreaming, in the opinion of the chroniclers. There is the art of interpreting the dream when it has been received, and also the art of inducing the required dream, that is to say the dream that shall give the required answer. Of this latter kind is the recipe for sleeping in the temple of Apollo, as advised by Achilles; of sleeping on the consecrated mat, as it is related that the Franciscans used to do; and even to this day in parts of the Continent there is quite a brisk sale of the little books giving directions how to produce the dream that shall tell you the winning numbers in the State lotteries. That all do not win, we can only ascribe to their lack of faith in not buying and reading the little books, or not following with sufficient piety their precepts when read. There is a brief but adequate prescription for dreaming of him or her who loves you in Halliwell's Nursery Rhymes, which contains, besides the rhymes, Fireside Tales, and accounts of many old English customs including a useful smattering of white magic, such as the divining from dreams.

For old English interpretations of dreams, no book is better than Saxon Leeckdoms, which has a whole chapter in the original Anglo - Saxon, with the translation facing it on the opposite page, devoted to dream interpretations, very direct and simple, with no reason given for the arbitrary meanings attached. A fuller account of the means for producing the dreams required is given in Brand's Popular Antiquities. It is curious, in that curious old book, to see the divining rod for water - finding treated as a survival of superstition, though now, many years after the book's publication, there is a revived tendency to faith in the use of the water - finder and his hazel twig.