eks Plato in the
_Timaeus_ (ch. xlvi, xlvii) explains dreams as prophetic visions
received by the lower appetitive soul through the liver; their
interpretation requires intelligence. The Stoics seem to have held that
dreams may be a divine revelation and more than one volume on the
interpretation of dreams has come down to us, the most important being
perhaps the [Greek: Oneirokritika] of Daldianus Artemidorus. We find
parallels to this in a Mussulman work by Gabdorrachaman, translated by
Pierre Vattier under the name of _Onirocrite mussulman_, and in the
numerous books on the interpretation of dreams which circulate at the
present day. In Siam dream books are found (_Intern. Archiv fur Anthr._
viii 150); one of the functions of the Australian medicine man is to
decide how a dream is to be interpreted.

_Modern Views._--The doctrine of Descartes that existence depended upon
thought naturally led his followers to maintain that the mind is always
thinking and consequently that dreaming is continuous. Locke replied to
this that men are not always conscious of dreaming, and it is hard to be
conceived that the soul of the sleeping man should this moment be
thinking, while the soul of the waking man cannot recollect in the next
moment a jot of all those thoughts. That we always dream was maintained
by Leibnitz, Kant, Sir W. Hamilton and others; the latter refutes the
argument of Locke by the just observation that the somnambulist has
certainly been conscious, but fails to recall the fact when he returns
to the normal state.

It has been commonly held by metaphysicians that the nature of dreams is
explained by the suspension of volition during sleep; Dugald Stewart
asserts that it is not wholly dormant but loses its hold on the
faculties, and he thus accounts for the incoherence of dreams and the
apparent reality of dream images.

Cudworth, from the orderly sequence of dream combinations and their
novelty, argues that the state arises, not from any "fortuitous dancings
of the spirits," but from the "phantastical power of the soul."
According to K. A. Scherner, dreaming is a decentralization of the
movement of life; the ego becomes purely receptive and is merely the
point around which the peripheral life plays in perfect freedom. Hobbes
held that dreams all proceed from the agitation of the inward parts of a
man's body, which, owing to their connexion with the brain, serve to
keep the latter in motion. For Schopenhauer the c