DREAMS are regarded by men in the lowest stage of culture ns objective realities, and all dreams are to them equally true : in the case of every dream the savage believes tiiat he really visits the places he dreams of, or is visited by the persons of whom he dreams. Hence those savages whose gods are, for instance, animal-totems, believe that wien they dream of the animal they have been visited by the god : thus the youn^ lied Indian adopts as his manitou the animal of which he dreams during his puberty-fast. A person who is visited by frequent dreams is regarded as a chosen medium between men and gods : the Zulus term a person thus chosen ' a house of dreams.' For the purpose of obtaining supernatural commimications of this kind, dreams are induced by artificial means, e.g. by fasting or the use of drugs. Then dreams come to be con- sidered less as objective experiences than as visions, warnings, revelations of the future sent by the gods. Such revelations may be sought, e.g. as by those who visit«d and slept in the cave of Trophonius for the express purpose of obtaining supernatural com- munications, or they may come unsought, as, e.g., the dream sent by Zeus to Agamemnon in the Iliad (ii. 1-34), or that of Xerxes described by Herodotus (vii. 12). To Homer and Herodotus it seems quite natural that the gods should, to accomplish their larger ends, send dreams to the individual which are intended to deceive him, and the dreams of Agamemnon and Xerxes are deceptive dreams of this kind. But to the deeper spiritual insight of Plato it appears a manifest impossibility, a viola- tion, so to speak, of the laws of religious thought, that a god should deceive men in any way (Hep. 382 E), whether by waking visions or by dreams in the night ; while at the same time he does not deny Uiat dreams may come from the gods, and elsewhere (Tim. cc. 46 and 47) he assigns a prophetic character to some dreams. But side by eide with this, the religious view of dreams, there existed and exists the superstitious view : the re- ligious view discriminates between dreams (which are sub-conscious states) just as it discriminates between our waking states of full consciousness, and marks off some of them as moments in which the spirit of man is in direct communication with his god ; the superstitious view, however, makes no such discrimination, it regards all dreams as omens, none as having a religious import. Its object is not to know the will of God, but to forecast the future ; and its method of doing so is neither religious nor scientific ; — not religious, for it makes no attempt humbly to approach the throne of heavenly grace ; and not scientific, because for the patient study of the laws by which God rules the universe it substitutes a system of jumping at con- clusions. It applies to dreams the same mode of in- terpretation as to other omens : it blindly assumes that things casually connected in thought are causally connected in fact, and draws its erroneous conclusions accordingly. These illogical processes frequently become developed into regular codes of interpretation (as, for instance, among the Arabs, the Persians, and in the Oneirocritica of Artenii- dorus) by means of which anyone can interpret his own dreams, and thus the uneducated classes in a civilized people relapse into a stage of thought as low as that of the savage.
Assuming it, for the moment, to be true that the state of partial consciousness which we call dreaming may, in exoei>tional cases, be chosen as the moment for divine communications to man, we see from the above sketch that the human race generally has reached the truth only after, and in consequence of, making many mistakes, just as Kepler invented and rejected fourteen theories to account for the apparent position of Mars before he bit apoD the right one, and just as the path of I
every science is strewed with the ruins of abau doned hypotheses. The question then arises whether the Jews also struggled through error into truth. In the first place, dreams are recorded both in NT (Mt 1»' 2"- ^) and in OT (Dn 2=») which are expressly said to be communications from God j though it is only in OT, and there only in Gn (Lis'-, Jacob's ladder), that God is said to appear Himself. In the next place there are dreams recorded (e.g. those of the chief butler and baker and of Pharaoh, Gn 40 and 41) which, though prophetic, are not expressly said to come from God ; indeed, from Gn 40" it appears that in the case of such dreams it is rather the ' interpreta- tions ' that ' belong to God.' Third, all the dreams actually mentioned in the Bible are dreams which came unsought, but the words of Saul (1 S 28" ' God is departed from me and answereth me no more, neither by prophets nor by dreams ') seem to indicate the existence of the practice (whether approved or disapproved of by the higher religious consciousness of the community) of de- liberately seekin" supernatural dreams, as they were sought in the cave of Trophonius. Fourth, it would appear from Jer 27' that there was amongst the Israelites a tendency, which the prophets opposed, to regard the mere dreaming of dreams as itself an indication that the dreamer was a chosen medium of divine communications, as the Zulus regard a 'house of dreams' as a chosen medium also. On the other hand, we do not find in the Bible any traces of the superstitious interpretation of dreams such as was known to the Arabs ; on the contrary, Joseph declares (Gn 40') with emphasis that ' inter- pretations belong to God ' ; and we do not find that dreams, when sought, were induced by artificial means. Thus, to sum up, on the one hand the Scriptures start from a spiritual height to which the religious consciousness of the heathen world attained only after a long course of evolution, and then only in the case of an isolated genius like Plato ; on the other hand, there are indications that the Israelites passed through several of the same stages of error as the rest oimankind.