There lived at Marseilles, a bigoted woman, who passed her days at church, and dreamt every night that she was transformed into a lamp: a dream she chose to verify; for, on the day of her death, a silver lamp was suspended, at her cost, in the choir of the church in which she was wont to follow her devotions.
Dreams are the peculiar province of the poet. Æneas, to justify his abandonment of Dido, cites the commands of his father, who appears to him every night. What more beautiful, except perhaps the dream of Athalia, than the dream of Æneas, in which Hector presents himself to the son of Anchises, pale and ghastly, as after he had become a victim to the vengeance of Achilles? In the Greek plays, and the French tragedies imitated from the Greek, dreams form a prominent feature. The family of Atrides were great dreamers:—Atreus, Agamemnon, Orestes, and Egisthus, the son of Atreus, had all remarkable dreams.
In Lemercier’s tragedy of “Agamemnon,” Egisthus relates that which is evidently the result of a dream;—but he will not admit it to be a dream, declaring that he “did not sleep.”
The impressions of dreams are often so vivid that we confound in our memory real facts with the visions of sleep. Hence, no doubt, the popular expression of “You must have dreamt that!”
The existence of dreams must be coeval with the human race. By the ancients, the Gods were thought to preside over them. The dreams of Pharaoh made the fortune of Joseph; and Artemidorus acquired a great reputation under the Antonines, by interpreting dreams. According to him, to dream of being weighed down by a mountain, portended proscription; and to dream of death, meant marriage. To dream that you are deprived of sight, intimates that you are about to lose one of your children. Artemidorus interpreted dreams in the same manner as the celebrated Mademoiselle Lenormand, or as Mrs. Williams, so well-known in London at the commencement of the present century.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
OF PREJUDICES ATTACHED TO CERTAIN ANIMALS.
Innumerable are the auguries which the remnants of ancient superstition have attached to certain animals. To meet a flock of sheep, is considered a lucky omen. To overtake one when proceeding to the house of a friend, determines many people to turn back as indicative of an inhospitable reception.