Medicine and philosophy - Classical Homeopathy Online

Aristotle on sleep and dreams 197also recognises that even medicine may contribute to the study of nature(a fact he hardly could ignore, given the large amount of anatomicaland physiological information preserved in the Hippocratic writings).This explains his readiness to incorporate medical views into his ownwritings.Having considered his theoretical position on the relationship betweenmedicine and the study of nature, let us now turn to the practice of the‘inquisitive non-specialist’ Aristotle in his discussion of the prognostic valueof dreams. For although the distinguished doctors’ opinion is a reputableview and as such an important indication that there are, in fact, dreamswhich play the part of signs of bodily events, the rational justification(eulogon) for the natural scientist’s sharing this view does not lie in thedoctors’ authority, but in the fact that he can give an explanation for it.The explanation which follows makes use of empirical claims but is alsobased on Aristotle’s own theory of dreams.For the fact is that movements occurring in the daytime, if they are not very greatand powerful, escape our notice in comparison with greater movements occurringin the waking state. But in sleep the opposite happens: then it is even the casethat small movements appear to be great. This is evident from what often happensduring sleep: people think that it is lightning and thundering, when there are onlyfaint sounds in their ears, and that they are enjoying honey and sweet flavourswhen a tiny bit of phlegm is running down their throats, and that they go througha fire and are tremendously hot when a little warmth is occurring around certainparts of the body. But when they wake up, they plainly recognise that these thingsare of this nature. Consequently, since of all things the beginnings are small, it isevident that also of diseases and of other affections which are going to occur in thebody, the beginnings are small. It is obvious, then, that these are necessarily moreclearly visible in sleep than in the waking state. (Div. somn. 463 a 7–21)It would seem that Aristotle’s account perfectly meets his requirements forthe dream being a sign of the event, that is, the disease. We have a startingpoint(e.g. a physical disturbance which causes pain) which is going toproduce a disease in the future and which also, at present, causes a dreamimage. If the dream is correctly interpreted, it can be reduced to its cause,which can be recognised as the cause of an imminent disease. Aristotle paysno attention to the rules for such a correct interpretation of dreams; heonly analyses the causal structure of the relationship between the dreamand the event foreseen in it. This analysis is based on two principles. Thefirst is one of the corner stones of his theory of dreams as set out in OnDreams (460 b 28ff.), namely that small movements become manifest moreclearly in sleep than in waking; this is because in the waking state these