Source edition
Aristotle. Aristotelis Opera, Volume 3. Bekker, Immanuel, editor. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1837.
Source data
A Digital Corpus for Graeco-Arabic Studies · CC BY-SA 4.0
Cloned and adapted by Humanitext, with ongoing edits.
Summary
This treatise by Aristotle investigates the possibility and mechanism of prophetic dreams from a naturalistic and philosophical perspective. The author begins by presenting the dilemma of whether to trust or doubt dream divination, classifying dreams into three categories: causes, tokens, and coincidences. He explains that subtle internal bodily changes sensed during sleep can serve as tokens of impending illness, and that dreams can cause subsequent waking actions, while dismissing dreams about distant events as mere coincidences. Furthermore, Aristotle argues that prophetic dreams are not sent by gods but are instead products of natural, daemonic operations. Critically revising Democritus's theory of emanation, he introduces a wave-propagation model to explain how physical movements in the air reach the sleeping soul. Ultimately, he defines the skilled interpreter of dreams as one who can detect resemblances in distorted dream-images, thereby explaining a seemingly supernatural phenomenon through physical principles.