Homer says in a comprehensive way that dreams come from Zeus. Seafield says that Homer "was aware of the necessity" (there seems a touch of unconscious humour about this phrase) " of distinguishing between the onar, or oneiros - the divinely sent message - and "the mere, meaningless which was incidental to any sleeping individual". The gods and goddesses who were interested, generally from motives that were frankly personal, in the success of this or the other champion of the Trojan war, constantly had recourse to sending dream messages to those they favoured, or sometimes delusive messages to those that they wished to bring to a bad end. The first book of the Iliad is especially interesting in the light it throws on the views of the ancient Greeks on dreams. The Grecian host is stricken with plague. Apollo has doubtless sent it upon them. But what have they done to earn his displeasure? That is the question that agitates the common mind. Achilles comes forward with a suggestion for discovering how they have merited such punishment. A true priest or prophet (where again is the expert to decide between the true and the false?) is to go, after due ceremonies, to some holy place, "good for dreams"; there, having made sacrifice and prayer, he will lay himself down to sleep on the skin of the sacrificed beast, and piety requires all to believe that if these rites be duly observed Apollo will appear to him in his dreams and reveal the reason of the Divine anger.

The Greeks credited their gods with a very cat - like affection for certain localities, so it is all of a piece with their general system of theology, that certain places should be especially good for dreams, good for the god appearing to sleeping men. Such places were the temples of Amphiaraus and of Podalirius. Of course our own folk lore and leech - crafts are full of invocations for dreams, but the locality is seldom held so important. Seafield indeed quotes Dendy: "The modern Franciscans, after the ceremony of Mass, throw themselves on mats already consecrated by the slumber of some holy visionary, and with this foolery they wait the Divine inspiration of their dream". But this is not quite the same thing as attributing a special virtue to a special place, for it would seem that wherever the holy mat were conveyed its efficacy in producing the divinely - inspired dream would not be affected.

In the Odyssey Athene is busy with dreams, fashioning an image like Iphigenia to go and comfort

Penelope in a dream. The recipe for the dream - making is interesting. The goddess does not personally assume the form of Iphigenia and go herself, which would seem to be the simplest way, but makes an image like the lady, and sends that. Perhaps, however, she was trying various recipes at the time, for when she wants to give some good advice to Nausicaa she does, in her own divine person, take the shape of the daughter of Dymas, and so appear to the sleeping maiden. But it is significant that in neither case does that plan which to us would seem the simplest of all for a goddess to take for such a purpose, appear to suggest itself to her, to make the sleeper believe that Iphigenia, in the one instance, and Dymas daughter in the other, had come to them. That make - believe idea would be an anachronism. The psychology of that day had not invented such a thing. To make a person see this or that in a dream, the thing had to appear before him.

Seafield does very well to point out the very close resemblance between the lying spirits denounced by Micaiah and the dream sent by Zeus at request of Thetis, to induce Agamemnon to lead the Greeks to battle in order that they might become aware of the loss their power sustained by the absence of Achilles (Thetis' son) who was still sulking in his tent Assuredly it must have been very hard in those days to know what to believe and what to disbelieve, in sleeping as well as in waking.

The Greeks of the Homeric Cycle had their analogical dreams, as well as the direct communication, even as the biblical people. When poor Penelope, much over - wooed grass - widow, is so grievously troubled by the "greedy" suitors for her hand, who, in course of hard wooing, are like to eat her out of house and home, she has a dream in which she sees twenty geese attacked and slain by a splendid eagle. So obvious an analogy as a goose for a wooer seems for some while to have escaped her notice - we may suppose her mind slightly worn by the nocturnal work of undoing the web she weft by day - but at length the significance of the identity of numbers, a goose to each of the twenty suitors, is forced on her out of the mouth of the eagle himself, who tells her that in him her husband is personified. Who more aptly represented after all in her eyes by the eagle, the royal bird of Zeus, than the god - like Ulysses! The whole blessed meaning of the vision became patent - Ulysses would come home like an eagle and destroy the horrible wooers. Ulysses in his proper shape first confirmed and then made good the eagles words. But of course it was all in the way of a parable, so to say - an allegory. It was not a direct message.

It was just on a par with Joseph's vision of the sheaves - a type of the analogical dream.

The Grecian tragedians, even Euripides who could laugh at the gods on occasion, seem to have accepted the divine inspiration of dreams, although it is hard to say how much stock a playwright takes in the notions that he puts into his creatures' heads. Herodotus does not commit himself much on the matter, his attitude, if he were a member of the Psychical Re search Society, would be eminently a mo - committal one, but all down all the pages of his history, rambling as it does from Greece through all the islands to Asia and Africa, everywhere we find the people he portrays earnest believers in the dream as a message sent from the gods. We do not seem to hear so much, in his company, of the bad, the delusive dream; but the attention that is paid to the instructions of dreams in general is strict even to piety. Plato was a poet, a creator. It would be hard for such a man, with so rich an imagination, to escape the attractive theory which he found ready made, that the gods spoke to men in dreams. His views on the subject are very fully discussed in the Timaeus, and his conclusion is distinct that knowledge is divinely communicated by dreams, and the manner of communication, according to his conception, is interesting.