Synesius on Dreams

[sdi]

I have another transcription for you all today: Saint Synesius of Cyrene on Dreams, as translated by Isaac Myer. Synesius was an odd duck, being both a Christian bishop and as Neoplatonist-y a Neoplatonist as one can get, but I found the essay—on the nature of imagination and an apology for dream divination—of interest and thought others might as well. As always, it is in the public domain and you can find the PDF in US Letter and A4 paper sizes.

Interestingly, we somehow have a number of Synesius' letters. In one that he wrote to his teacher Hypatia (yes, that one) we have a brief account of how this essay came about (as translated by Augustine Fitzgerald):

[Regarding On Dreams,] God ordained and He gave His sanction to it, and it has been set up as a thank-offering to the imaginative faculties. It contains an inquiry into the whole imaginative soul, and into some other points which have not yet been handled by any Greek philosopher. But why should one dilate on this? This work was completed, the whole of it, in a single night, or rather, at the end of a night, one which also brought the vision enjoining me to write it. There are two or three passages in the book in which it seemed to me that I was some other person, and that I was one listening to myself amongst others who were present.

Even now this work, as often as I go over it, produces a marvelous effect upon me, and a certain divine voice envelops me as in poetry. Whether this my experience is not unique, or may happen to another, on all this you will enlighten me, for after myself you will be the first of the Greeks to have access to the work.

(I'm amazed he could have wrote this in a single night—it took me an entire week merely to transcribe it!)

Comments

transcription

[ehu]

many thanks for this!

Re: transcription

[sdi]

You're welcome!