You must lie in another county, and knit the left garter about the right legged stocking (let the other garter and stocking alone) and as you rehearse these following verses, at every comma, knit a knot.
This knot I knit,
To know the thing, I know not yet,
That I may see,
The man (woman) that shall my husband (wife) be,
How he goes, and what he wears,
And what he does, all days, and years.
Accordingly in your dream you will see him: if a musician, with a lute or other instrument; if a scholar, with a book or papers.
A gentlewoman that I knew, confessed in my hearing, that she used this method, and dreamt of her husband whom she had never seen: about two or three years after, as she was on Sunday at church, (at our Lady's church in Sarum) up pops a young Oxonian in the pulpit: she cries out presently to her sister, this is the very face of the man that I saw in my dream. Sir William Soames's Lady did the like.
Another way, is, to charm the moon thus: at the first appearance of the new moon* after new year's day, go out in the evening, and stand over the spars of a gate or stile, looking on the moon and say, **
All hail to the moon, all hail to thee,
I prithee good moon reveal to me,
This night, who my husband (wife) must be.
You must presently after go to bed.
* Some say any other new moon is as good.
** In Yorkshire they kneel on a ground-fast stone.
I knew two gentlewomen that did thus when they were young maids, and they had dreams of those that married them.
Alexander Tralianus, of curing diseases by spells, charms, &c. is cited by Casaubon, before John Dee's Book of Spirits: it is now translated out of the Greek into English.