There are many other modes of signification in dreams given. Horses of different colours mean different things. It is lucky to dream about a donkey, and so on, to a tedious length. It is perhaps useful to know what you should do on awaking from a bad dream; "it is prudent to spit on the left side, and to ask divine protection from Satan."

Of course the Magi and all the Oriental wise men were great on the interpretation of dreams. There is a canon of dream meanings that is attributed to Astrampsychos. I am not very clear whether it was an individual of that name that collected these interpretations, or whether they were merely attributed to him as being strung together by disciples of his school. In any case it does not matter much, and perhaps it is all the more in accord with the subject that a certain haziness should brood over the authorship of the canon. There is nothing very noteworthy about this canon, which it is not worth while to transcribe at length. Seafield has it all - at least I think there is no more of it than he gives. This point is worth mentioning, that several of the maxims show an appreciation of the notion that we in our language express by saying that "dreams go by contraries". It is known that this is a view of the old Persians, and if it were not otherwise known it might be inferred very obviously and surely from this canon: "Laughter in sleep presages difficult circumstances." "To weep in sleep is a sign of the utmost joy." "If any one offers incense to you, it portends misfortune."

On the other hand, the vast majority are interpretations from analogy, so to say, accepting the dream in an allegorical sense. Thus "to wash the hands denotes the release from anxieties." "To be dead signifies freedom from anxiety." "To shiver a sword signifies the crushing of our foes."

Black, in various forms, is a bad colour in dreams. It is bad in clothes and bad in horses.

One maxim runs: "The sight of a hare portends an unlucky journey". Has not this idea still some existence? "The sight of a mouse bespeaks propitious circumstances" is a maxim of which one does not easily see the reason. One interesting one is "for a blind man to see is the best omen possible". It is said, by modern people, that the dreams of the blind are never occupied with seeing, and that if one who has been able to see loses his sight his dreams soon lose all visual character and occupy themselves only with impressions of other sensations. This is a point that might be much better studied in the East, where, unhappily, disease of the eye is so very common and so little understood - where, in fact, as George Borrow said of Spain, "opthalmia and oculists are equally to be feared."

I will only quote two other maxims from this canon: "To swim in the sea forebodes bitter sorrow" and " to dream in the daytime of swimming

The interest of these contradicting maxims is that they introduce us to an idea that is frequent enough as a principle of dream interpretation in the East - the idea that the time at which a dream is dreamt makes a difference in its significance. So strongly was this idea held by the Persians that there is a canon of dream interpretation existing in the languages of Persia, and also in the dialect of Gujerat, in which the significance of the dreams is made entirely dependent on the day of the month in which they are dreamed, and apparently entirely independent of the character of the dreams themselves.

On the first day of the month the dream will be good, the significance clear. But the dream must not be told to any one till it is fulfilled. (This prudent clause survives.)

On the second day dreams will come true within four days; but they are apt to delude (owing apparently, to doubtful significance).

Dreams will generally come true on the fourth, fifth, and sixth days. On the third day, dreams will not come true. Many are more or less indifferent days. As we speak of good or bad or indifferent days for scent, when hunting or shooting, so there are in this Sifat-i-Sirozah, good, bad, and indifferent days for dreaming. But the dreamer has the advantage of knowing beforehand the character of the days. Curiously enough, though each day, in the Persian conception, has its own guardian angel, the character of the angel seems to have had little connection with the character of the dreams dreamt on his day. The seventeenth day is the day of Serosh, the angel who presides over learning ; and yet this is a very bad day for dreaming. All the dreams on it will prove false. Even the day of Dep-din, "who is God himself," that is to say the twenty-third of the month, is an inauspicious day, and "whatever may be dreamt of ought to be kept secret".

Astrampsychos, whoever he was, although he wrote in Greek, was, so far as his heritage in his dream interpretation goes, an Oriental, like the author or collator of Sifat-i-Sirozah.

Macrobius, who had something to say about dream interpretations in the fourth century, was probably a Greek, though he lived at Rome. He has a fivefold division, and again a fivefold subdivision of dreams; and this would not be so interesting if it was not that Artemidorus who is the great interpreter of all (the man on whose writings are composed all the chap-books - the Royal Book of Dreams, etc.- that pedlars still sell at fairs) makes use of the same division. I do not know whether one derived the division from the other. Probably both picked it up from opinions floating in the air at a time when the interpretation of dreams was an affair of very considerable importance.

The divisions, then, of Macrobius were into:-

1. or Somnium - the kind of dream that revealed things in an allegory - the special subject of interpretation.

2. or Visio - a vision seen in a waking state of trance or delusion (obviously this is not in the modern sense a dream at all. It is not an operation of the mind during sleep).