“And I, Daniel, fainted and was sick certain days.”
Even here, may we not believe, that the Creator did not alter his law?
It was Dr. Cullen who first drew a parallel between insanity and dreams. As some proof of his insight, we read in Lode of a man who never dreamed until he fell into a fever in the twenty-fifth year;—in Beattie, of a young friend who never dreamt unless his health was deranged.
And Mr. Locke thus writes: “I once knew a man who was bred a scholar, and had no bad memory, who told me that he had never dreamed in his life until he had fever.”
This immunity from dreams is also most marked in savages, unless during disorder or at the dying moment. Ulloa, Humboldt, and La Condamine, all agree as to the character of indolence and absence of thought and fancy in the native Americans, and it is as sure that they seldom dream.
Now whatever influence tends to arrest or derange the upper circulation of the blood in its return to the heart, or to detain it in the vessels of the brain, or which presses on an important nerve, so as to disturb the function of the brain or spinal cord, by continuous sympathy, may be the remote cause of the phenomena of dreaming.
Such are the results of repletion, dyspepsia, the supine position, &c. &c.
And here, Astrophel, I meet your metaphysician.
Galen, and indeed the ancients generally, attributed dreams chiefly to indigestion; but referred their immediate excitement to fumes and vapours, instead of to nervous influence, or cerebral congestion from interrupted circulation.
Cast. And here, Evelyn, courtesy might have prompted you to meet my poets. Let me see, is it not Dryden who writes of —