Study Edition · Essay 12
On Dreams
Source: Simon Wilkin's edition of Browne's Works (1835–36), via Wikisource. Browne's manuscript spelling (wee, dayes, butt) has been modernized for this edition, and two words missing from the manuscript are supplied in [brackets]. Archaic verb forms modernized; vocabulary kept and glossed.
Browne was a doctor in Norwich and one of the most musical prose writers in English. This short piece, found among his papers after his death, wanders through what dreams are and where they come from. Are they divine, demonic or just digestion? It is packed with learned examples from the Bible, classical history and medicine, and ends with a typically playful thought about death. Expect long sentences and many allusions: the notes will carry you through.
46 sentences: 5 simple, 17 moderate, 24 complex. Hover a number for its paraphrase; click it for the full note.
Key Vocabulary
- exact(verb) to demand and take, like a tax
- fantasticalimaginary; produced by fantasy
- confessedlyadmittedly
- fainobliged; forced by circumstances
- betake (oneself)to go; to take oneself off to
- melancholyin old medicine, black bile, thought to cause dark moods and visions
- similitudelikeness; resemblance
- phantasman image or illusion in the mind
- perpendto weigh up; consider carefully
- sagaciouswise; shrewd
- oneirocriticismthe art of interpreting dreams
- prefermentpromotion to a higher position
- divinationforetelling the future by signs
- consumptivesuffering from tuberculosis
- fallaciousmisleading; false
- leguminousmade of beans, peas or lentils
- casuista theologian who judges cases of conscience
- noctambuloa sleepwalker
- arrearagesoverdue debts
- swoonto faint
The Essay
Half our days we pass in the shadow of the earth, and the brother of death exacts a third part of our lives.1 A good part of our sleeps is pieced out with visions, and fantastical objects wherein we are confessedly deceived.2 The day supplies us with truths, the night with fictions and falsehoods, which uncomfortably divide the natural account of our beings.3 And therefore having passed the day in sober labours and rational enquiries of truth, we are fain to betake ourselves unto such a state of being, wherein the soberest heads have acted all the monstrosities of melancholy, and which unto open eyes are no better than folly and madness.4
Happy are they that go to bed with grave music like Pythagoras, or have ways to compose the fantastical spirit, whose unruly wanderings take off inward sleep, filling our heads with St. Anthony's visions, and the dreams of Lipara in the sober chambers of rest.5 Virtuous thoughts of the day lay up good treasures for the night, whereby the impressions of imaginary forms arise into sober similitudes, acceptable unto our slumbering selves, and preparatory unto divine impressions: hereby Solomon's sleep was happy.6 Thus prepared Jacob might well dream of Angels upon a pillow of stone, and the first sleep of Adam might be the best any after.7
That there should be divine dreams seems unreasonably doubted by Aristotle.8 That there are demoniacal dreams we have little reason to doubt.9 Why may there not be Angelical?10 If there are Guardian spirits, they may not be unactively about us in sleep, but may sometimes order our dreams, and many strange hints, instigations, or discoveries which are so amazing unto us, may arise from such foundations.11 But the phantasms of sleep do commonly walk in the great road of natural & animal dreams; wherein the thoughts or actions of the day are acted over and echoed in the night.12 Who can therefore wonder that Chrysostom should dream of St. Paul who daily read his Epistles; or that Cardan whose head was so taken up about the stars should dream that his soul was in the moon!13 Pious persons whose thoughts are daily busied about heaven & the blessed state thereof, can hardly escape the nightly phantasms of it, which though sometimes taken for illuminations or divine dreams, yet rightly perpended may prove but animal visions and natural night scenes of their waking contemplations.14
Many dreams are made out by sagacious exposition from the signature of their subjects; carrying their interpretation in their fundamental sense & mystery of similitude, whereby he that understands upon what natural fundamental every notional depends, may by symbolical adaptation hold a ready way to read the characters of Morpheus.15 In dreams of such a nature Artemidorus, Achmet, and Astrampsychus, from Greek, Egyptian, and Arabian oneirocriticism, may hint some interpretation, who, while we read of a ladder in Jacob's dream, will tell us that ladders and scalary ascents signify preferment, & while we consider the dream of Pharaoh, do teach us, that rivers overflowing speak plenty, lean oxen famine and scarcity, and therefore it was but reasonable in Pharaoh to demand the interpretation from his magicians, who being Egyptians, should have been well versed in symbols & the hieroglyphical notions of things.16 The greatest tyrant in such divinations was Nabuchodonosor, while beside the interpretation he demanded the dream itself; which being probably determined by divine immission, might escape the common road of phantasms, that might have been traced by Satan.17
When Alexander going to besiege Tyre dreamt of a Satyr, it was no hard exposition for a Grecian to say, Tyre will be thine.18 He that dreamed that he saw his father washed by Jupiter and anointed by the sun, had cause to fear that he might be crucified, whereby his body would be washed by the rain & drop by the heat of the sun.19 The dream of Vespasian was of harder exposition, as also that of the Emperor Mauritius concerning his successor Phocas.20 And a man might have been hard put to it to interpret the language of Aesculapius, when to a consumptive person he held forth his fingers, implying thereby that his cure lay in dates, from the homonymy of the Greek which signifies dates & fingers.21 We owe unto dreams that Galen was a physician, Dion an historian, and that the world has seen some notable pieces of Cardan, yet he that should order his affairs by dreams, or make the night rule unto the day, might be ridiculously deluded.22 Wherein Cicero is much to be pitied; who having excellently discoursed of the vanity of dreams, was yet undone by the flattery of his own, which urged him to apply himself unto Augustus.23
However dreams may be fallacious concerning outward events, yet may they be truly significant at home, & whereby we may more sensibly understand ourselves.24 Men act in sleep with some conformity unto their awaked senses, & consolations or discouragements may be drawn from dreams, which intimately tell us ourselves.25 Luther was not like to fear a spirit in the night, when such an apparition would not terrify him in the day.26 Alexander would hardly have run away in the sharpest combats of sleep, nor Demosthenes have stood stoutly to it, who was scarce able to do it in his prepared senses.27 Persons of radical integrity will not easily be perverted in their dreams, nor noble minds [do] pitiful things in sleep.28 Crassus would have hardly been bountiful in a dream, whose fist was so close awake.29 But a man might have lived all his life upon the sleeping hand of Antonius.30
There is an Art to make dreams as well as their interpretations, and physicians will tell us that some food makes turbulent, some gives quiet dreams.31 Cato who doted upon cabbage might find the crude effects thereof in his sleep; wherein the Egyptians might find some advantage by their superstitious abstinence from onions.32 Pythagoras might have more calmer sleeps if he totally abstained from beans.33 Even Daniel, that great interpreter of dreams, in his leguminous diet seems to have chosen no advantageous food for quiet sleeps according to Grecian physic.34 To add unto the delusion of dreams, the fantastical objects seem greater than they are, and being beheld in the vaporous state of sleep, enlarge their diameters unto us; whereby it may prove more easy to dream of Giants than pygmies.35 Democritus might seldom [dream] of Atoms, who so often thought of them.36 Helmont might dream himself a bubble extending unto the eighth sphere.37 A little water makes a sea, a small puff of wind a Tempest, a grain of sulphur kindled in the blood may make a flame like Etna, and a small spark in the bowels of Olympias a lightning over all the chamber.38 But beside these innocent delusions there is a sinful state of dreams; death alone, not sleep is able to put an end unto sin, & there may be a night book of our Iniquities; for beside the transgressions of the day, casuists will tell us of mortal sins in dreams arising from evil precogitations; meanwhile human law does not regard noctambulos; and if a night walker should break his neck, or kill a man, takes no notice of it.39 Dionysius was absurdly tyrannical to kill a man for dreaming that he had killed him, and really to take away his life who had but fantastically taken away his.40 Lamia was ridiculously unjust to sue a young man for a reward, who had confessed that pleasure from her in a dream, which she had denied unto his awaking senses, conceiving that she had merited somewhat from his fantastical fruition & shadow of herself.41
If there are such debts, we owe deeply unto sympathies, but the common spirit of the world must be judge in such arrearages.42 If some have swooned they may have also died in dreams since death is but a confirmed swooning.43 Whether Plato died in a dream, as some deliver, he must rise again to inform us.44 That some have never dreamed is as improbable as that some have never laughed.45 That children do not dream the first half year, that men do not dream in some countries, with many more, are unto me sick men's dreams, dreams out of the Ivory gate, and visions before midnight.46
Sentence Notes
In plain English: We spend half our time in night (the earth's shadow), and sleep, the brother of death, takes a third of our lives from us.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: Browne makes sleep a tax-collector demanding a third of our lives. It's an elegant opening that links sleep, death and time.
Reference & context: Mythology: in Homer and Hesiod, Hypnos (Sleep) and Thanatos (Death) are twin brothers. “The shadow of the earth” is Browne's scientific way of saying night.
Modernized: exacteth → exacts
In plain English: Much of our sleep is filled with visions and imaginary things that, we have to admit, deceive us.
In plain English: Day gives us truth and night gives us fiction and falsehood, which awkwardly splits our lives into two accounts.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: A balanced statement that frames the whole essay: our lives are split between a true day-self and a dreaming night-self.
Modernized: supplieth → supplies
In plain English: So after a day of serious work and rational search for truth, we're forced to enter a state in which even the most sensible people act out all the monstrous fantasies of a disordered mind, things that, seen with open eyes, would be pure madness.
In plain English: Lucky are those who, like Pythagoras, go to bed listening to solemn music, or have some way to calm the imagination, whose wild wanderings spoil deep sleep and fill our quiet bedrooms with nightmares like St. Anthony's temptations or the fiery dreams of the volcanic Lipari islands.
Reference & context: Historical: Pythagoras reportedly used music to calm his followers before sleep. St. Anthony the Great, a desert hermit, was tormented by demonic visions. Lipara (Lipari) is a volcanic island off Sicily, legendary home of the god Vulcan's forge.
Modernized: takes of → take off
In plain English: Good thoughts during the day store up good things for the night: the images we dream become calm, sensible pictures that please us as we sleep and prepare us to receive messages from God. That is how Solomon came to have his blessed dream.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: A gentle idea that still persuades: how we spend our days shapes our nights.
Reference & context: Biblical: 1 Kings 3:5–15, where God appears to Solomon in a dream and grants him wisdom. “Lay up treasures” echoes Matthew 6:20.
In plain English: Prepared in this way, Jacob could dream of angels even with a stone for a pillow, and Adam's first sleep may have been the best sleep anyone ever had.
Reference & context: Biblical: Genesis 28:11–12 (Jacob's ladder dream, his head on a stone) and Genesis 2:21 (God puts Adam into a deep sleep to create Eve).
In plain English: Aristotle doubted that dreams could come from God, and Browne thinks that doubt was unreasonable.
Reference & context: Philosophical: Aristotle's short treatise On Divination in Sleep argues that dreams are not sent by the gods.
In plain English: That some dreams come from demons, we have little reason to doubt.
In plain English: So why shouldn't some dreams come from angels?
In plain English: If guardian angels exist, they are probably not idle while we sleep; they may sometimes arrange our dreams, and many strange hints, urges and discoveries that amaze us may come from them.
Modernized: be → are
In plain English: But most dream images follow the ordinary road of natural, bodily dreams, in which the thoughts and actions of the day are replayed and echoed at night.
Reference & context: Old medicine: “animal” comes from Latin anima (soul or breath). “Animal spirits” were the fluids thought to carry sensation and thought.
In plain English: So it is no surprise that St. John Chrysostom, who read Paul's letters every day, dreamed of St. Paul; or that Cardano, whose mind was full of astronomy, dreamed his soul was on the moon.
Reference & context: Historical: St. John Chrysostom (c.347–407), a great preacher devoted to Paul's letters. Girolamo Cardano (1501–1576), Italian mathematician, doctor and astrologer, who recorded his own dreams.
In plain English: Religious people who think about heaven all day can hardly avoid dreaming about it at night. They sometimes take these dreams for divine revelations, but on reflection they may be just natural dreams replaying their waking thoughts.
In plain English: Many dreams can be interpreted wisely by looking at the outward signs of what they show, because their meaning lies in resemblances. Someone who understands what natural thing each idea is based on can, by translating symbols, easily read the language of dreams.
Reference & context: Science of the time: the “doctrine of signatures” held that things carry outward signs of their hidden nature, e.g. walnuts, shaped like brains, were good for the head. Morpheus is the Greek god of dreams (hence “morphine”).
Modernized: dependeth → depends
In plain English: For dreams of this kind, the ancient dream-interpreters Artemidorus, Achmet and Astrampsychus can offer some help. Reading Jacob's dream, they tell us that ladders and stairs mean promotion. Reading Pharaoh's dream, they tell us that overflowing rivers mean abundance and thin cattle mean famine. So it was only reasonable for Pharaoh to ask his magicians to interpret it, since as Egyptians they should have been experts in symbols and hieroglyphs.
Reference & context: Historical: Artemidorus of Daldis wrote the Oneirocritica (2nd century AD), the most famous ancient dream manual; “Achmet” and “Astrampsychus” were names attached to later dream-books. Biblical: Pharaoh's dream of fat and lean cattle, interpreted by Joseph (Genesis 41).
In plain English: The most tyrannical dream-questioner was Nebuchadnezzar, who demanded that his wise men tell him not only the meaning of his dream but the dream itself. Since that dream was probably sent by God, it lay outside the ordinary dreams that even Satan could have tracked.
Reference & context: Biblical: Daniel 2. King Nebuchadnezzar threatened to kill all his wise men if they couldn't tell him both his dream and its meaning; only Daniel could.
In plain English: When Alexander the Great, about to besiege Tyre, dreamed of a satyr, it was easy for a Greek to interpret: “Tyre will be yours.”
Reference & context: Historical: Plutarch, Life of Alexander 24. The pun: in Greek, sa Tyros means “Tyre is yours.” Alexander took the city in 332 BC.
In plain English: Someone who dreamed of seeing his father washed by Jupiter (god of the sky and rain) and oiled by the sun had reason to fear crucifixion, since a crucified body is washed by rain and drips in the heat of the sun.
Reference & context: Historical: Herodotus (3.124) tells this of the daughter of Polycrates, tyrant of Samos. Her dream came true when the Persians crucified him around 522 BC.
In plain English: Vespasian's dream was harder to interpret, as was the Emperor Maurice's dream about his successor Phocas.
Reference & context: Historical: Suetonius reports that Vespasian dreamed his good fortune would begin when Nero lost a tooth. The Byzantine emperor Maurice (reigned 582–602) was overthrown and killed by the soldier Phocas, which a dream reportedly foretold.
In plain English: And anyone would have struggled to understand Asclepius, the god of medicine, when in a dream he held up his fingers to a patient with tuberculosis, meaning that the cure was dates, because the same Greek word means both “fingers” and “dates.”
Reference & context: Language: Greek daktylos means both “finger” and “date” (the fruit), which is why English “date” comes from it. Sick people slept in temples of Asclepius hoping for healing dreams.
In plain English: We have dreams to thank for Galen becoming a doctor, Dio becoming a historian, and for some of Cardano's notable writings. Yet anyone who ran his life by dreams, letting the night govern the day, could be made a complete fool of.
Reference & context: Historical: Galen's father was told in a dream to have his son study medicine. Dio Cassius said a dream told him to write history. Galen (AD 129–c.216) became the most influential doctor of antiquity.
Modernized: hath → has
In plain English: Here Cicero deserves our pity: after writing brilliantly about how meaningless dreams are, he was ruined by a flattering dream of his own, which led him to support the young Augustus.
Reference & context: Historical: in On Divination Cicero mocked belief in dreams. Plutarch says Cicero dreamed the boy Octavian (later Augustus) would rule Rome, and backed him; Octavian then allowed Mark Antony to have Cicero killed in 43 BC.
In plain English: Dreams may mislead us about outside events, but they can tell us something true about ourselves, helping us understand ourselves better.
Reference & context: Browne anticipates, by over two centuries, the modern idea that dreams reveal the dreamer's own mind (Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 1899).
In plain English: People behave in their sleep somewhat as they do awake, and we can take comfort or warning from dreams, which reveal our inner selves.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: “Tell us ourselves” is a striking phrase: dreams as a mirror, not a prophecy.
In plain English: Luther wasn't likely to be afraid of a ghost at night, when the same apparition wouldn't have frightened him by day.
Reference & context: Historical: a famous legend says Martin Luther threw an inkpot at the Devil, who appeared while he was translating the Bible.
In plain English: Alexander would hardly have fled from even the fiercest dream battle, and Demosthenes would hardly have stood his ground in a dream, since he could barely do so awake and ready.
Reference & context: Historical: Demosthenes, the great orator, threw away his shield and fled at the Battle of Chaeronea (338 BC).
In plain English: People whose honesty runs deep won't easily turn wicked in their dreams, and noble minds won't do shameful things in their sleep.
In plain English: Crassus, so tight-fisted when awake, would hardly have been generous in his dreams.
Reference & context: Historical: Marcus Licinius Crassus (c.115–53 BC), the richest man in Rome, was notorious for greed.
In plain English: But you could have lived your whole life on what Mark Antony gave away in his sleep.
Reference & context: Historical: Mark Antony was famously lavish. Plutarch tells stories of his reckless generosity.
In plain English: There is a skill to producing dreams as well as interpreting them, and doctors will tell you some foods cause disturbed dreams and others calm ones.
In plain English: Cato, who adored cabbage, may have felt its indigestible effects in his sleep; the Egyptian priests, on the other hand, may have slept better thanks to their superstitious refusal to eat onions.
Reference & context: Historical: Cato the Elder praised cabbage as a cure-all in On Agriculture. Plutarch says Egyptian priests avoided onions.
In plain English: Pythagoras may have slept more calmly because he never ate beans.
Reference & context: Historical: the Pythagoreans famously forbade eating beans. One ancient explanation was that beans caused troubled sleep. (“More calmer” is a double comparative, normal in older English.)
In plain English: Even Daniel, the great dream-interpreter, chose a diet of beans and lentils, which according to Greek medicine is not good for quiet sleep.
Reference & context: Biblical: Daniel 1:12, where Daniel asks to be fed only “pulse” (beans and lentils) and water.
Modernized: seemes → seems
In plain English: Dreams deceive us further because imaginary things look bigger than they are; seen through the misty haze of sleep, they swell in size, so it may be easier to dream of giants than of tiny people.
Reference & context: Old medicine: sleep was thought to be caused by “vapours” rising from the stomach to the brain.
In plain English: Democritus, who thought about atoms all the time, probably rarely dreamed of them (because atoms are too small, and dreams enlarge everything).
Why this phrase is worth keeping: A witty twist: dreams magnify, so the father of atomic theory couldn't dream about atoms.
Reference & context: Historical: Democritus (c.460–370 BC) was the Greek philosopher who first proposed that everything is made of tiny atoms.
In plain English: Van Helmont might dream that he was a bubble swelling out as far as the stars.
Reference & context: Historical: Jan Baptist van Helmont (1580–1644), Flemish chemist who coined the word “gas.” Old astronomy: the eighth sphere was the sphere of the fixed stars.
In plain English: In dreams, a little water becomes a sea, a puff of wind becomes a storm, a grain of sulphur burning in the blood becomes a volcano like Etna, and a small spark in Olympias's womb becomes lightning filling the whole room.
Reference & context: Historical: Plutarch says Olympias, mother of Alexander the Great, dreamed before his birth that a thunderbolt struck her womb and a great fire spread around. Etna is the volcano in Sicily.
In plain English: Apart from these harmless illusions, dreams can also be sinful. Only death, not sleep, stops us sinning, and there may be a night-time record of our wrongs, since moral theologians say that evil thoughts before sleep can lead to serious sins in dreams. Human law, by contrast, takes no account of sleepwalkers: if one breaks his neck or kills someone, the law ignores it.
Reference & context: Law: English law did not hold sleepwalkers responsible for their acts, a principle still debated in courts today.
Modernized: regards not → does not regard
In plain English: Dionysius was absurdly cruel to execute a man for dreaming that he had killed him: taking a real life for an imaginary killing.
Reference & context: Historical: Plutarch tells this of Dionysius, tyrant of Syracuse, who executed a man named Marsyas for such a dream.
In plain English: Lamia, a courtesan, was ridiculously unfair to sue a young man for payment because he admitted he'd enjoyed her in a dream, after she'd refused him in real life, as if she had earned something from his imaginary pleasure with a mere shadow of her.
Reference & context: Historical: Plutarch (Life of Demetrius 27) tells a version of this story about the Egyptian courtesan Thonis. The famous courtesan Lamia comments on the judgement, and Browne attaches the story to her.
In plain English: If dreams could create real debts, we would owe a great deal to the hidden connections between things; but only the world-soul could judge such cases.
Reference & context: Philosophy of the time: “sympathies” were hidden natural attractions between things, and the “spirit of the world” (anima mundi) was a world-soul believed to link everything.
Modernized: be → are
In plain English: If people have fainted in their dreams, some may also have died in them, since death is just a fainting that becomes permanent.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: A doctor's calm definition of death that is also strangely comforting.
In plain English: As for whether Plato died while dreaming, as some claim, he'll have to rise from the dead to tell us.
Reference & context: Tradition held that Plato died peacefully in his sleep, or at a wedding feast; accounts differ.
In plain English: That some people have never dreamed is as unlikely as that some have never laughed.
In plain English: Claims that babies don't dream in their first six months, that people in some countries never dream, and many others like them, seem to me like sick men's dreams: false dreams through the gate of ivory, visions before midnight.
Reference & context: Literary: in Homer's Odyssey (Book 19) and Virgil's Aeneid (Book 6), true dreams come through a gate of horn and false ones through a gate of ivory. Folk belief held that dreams before midnight were false. Herodotus claimed the Atlantes of Africa never dreamed.
Modernized: dream not → do not dream; dream not → do not dream
Fun Fact
Browne wrote movingly about the vanity of hoping our bones will rest in peace (in Urn Burial, 1658, he asked who knows “the fate of his bones”). His own did not. In 1840 workmen accidentally broke open his coffin in a Norwich church, and his skull was taken away. It ended up on display in a hospital museum and was not reburied until 1922, 240 years after his death. This essay itself was never published in his lifetime and survived only in his manuscripts.