Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] They claim that dreams are more certain and more refined toward the end of the night, as if the soul's vigor were by then emerging, drawn out by prolonged sleep. As for the seasons of the year, spring is said to be quieter, because summer dissolves souls, winter in a way hardens them, and autumn — otherwise a tempter of health — dissolves them with the most winey juices of its fruits. [2] Likewise from the very posture of rest: whether one lies neither on the back nor on the right side, nor with the inner organs turned back on themselves, as if the seat of the senses were spilled out and set adrift, or whether the mind's dwelling is disturbed by a liver overloaded and compressed. But I think these things are ingeniously conjectured rather than firmly proven, even though Plato is the one who conjectured them; and perhaps they turn out this way by chance. Otherwise, dreams would be a matter of choice, if they could be steered at will. [3] As for the question of choosing or forgoing certain foods, which now presumption, now superstition, prescribes as a discipline for dreams — this must be examined: superstition, as when a fast is enjoined on those about to sleep in the temple to induce ritual purity; presumption, as when the Pythagoreans, for this same reason too, reject the bean as a burdensome, wind-inducing food. And yet that trio of brothers with Daniel, content with pulse alone so as not to be defiled by the king's dishes, won from God, beyond all their other wisdom, the special grace of dreams — both of obtaining them and of expounding them. [4] As for me — fasting, I don't know whether I alone dream so much and so deeply that I don't even sense that I have dreamed. "So then," you say, "sobriety has nothing to do with this matter?" On the contrary, all the more with this than with anything else; if it matters even for superstition, how much more for true religion. For even the demons demand it of their own dreamers, to serve, of course, as a pimping-out of divinity, because they know it is familiar to God — just as Daniel, again, dried himself out with three weeks of fasting, though he did so to entice God by acts of humbling himself, not to build up in his soul, about to dream, any sense or wisdom, as though it were not to act in ecstasy. So then, sobriety will not serve to banish ecstasy, but to commend that very ecstasy — so that it may happen in God.