to
ascribe the impressions, which their memory retained of the creation of
their fancy during their slumbers, to the instrumentality of their own
conceits; they could not fail therefore to impute them to the
interposition of some foreign agent, and to whom more naturally could
they refer them than to a divinity? When awake, they imagined themselves
always attended by the gods in person, and ascribed every thought, and
resolved every appearance or accident, which deviated from the common
course of nature, to the immediate influence of a superintending deity.
It was under such impressions that so many nations originally rested
their belief in divinatory dreams. The records of antiquity therefore
abound in instances (for the greater part of an early date) where the
actions of men have been the result of a dream, whose conceit was
entirely at variance with the real state of their affairs. It was not
long before the diversity of dreams awakened their attention: some were
connected and simple, others were obscure, and made up of curious
fancies, though not incapable of being resolved by the windings and
turnings of allegory.

It was no unnatural transition from the received belief in dreams, to
the idea that they might become the medium of seeking instruction from
the gods: hence the institution of oracles, whose responses were given
in dreams; and the addition of sleeping chambers to many temples, such
as those in Epidaurus and at Oropos. Here it was, that after pious
ceremonies and prayers, men laid themselves down in expectation of
dreams; when the expectation was realized, though the dream proved ever
so confused or intricate, the dreamer always succeeded in reconciling
it to his circumstances: his own belief and priestly wiles, readily
effected the solution. The conceit of dreams, according to the votary's
wishes, was so powerfully promoted by the preparatory initiation he had
undergone, that it would have been somewhat extraordinary had he been
altogether disappointed. He was generally anxious to increase the fame
of his divinity by his dream, and possessed a high veneration and deep
impression of the miracles which that divinity had wrought. With these
predispositions he resorted to the temple, where he had a whole day
before him to ponder on his malady, and on every sort of remedy that
might have been suggested to him; how natural was it, therefore, for his
busy imagination to fix, in his sleep, upon one particular r