Aristotle on sleep and dreams 173
about ‘ecstatic’, clairvoyant experiences such as told about Hermotimus of
Clazomenae and other ‘shamans’.^11 It seems to have appealed also to Plato
and even, if the indirect tradition can be trusted, to Aristotle in his early
years.^12 Yet both thinkers seem to have emancipated themselves from this
position. For, at other places in his work, Plato seems to allow that our
sleeping lives somehow reflect our mental state in the waking life. Thus in
a well-known passage in theRepublic, he suggests that dreams reflect an
individual’s spiritual state in that they show whether the soul is calm and
orderly, guided by reason, or subjected to emotions and desires:
(I mean) those desires that are awakened in sleep, when the rest of the soul – the
rational, gentle, and ruling part – slumbers. Then the beastly and savage part, full
of food and drink, casts off sleep and seeks to find a way to gratify itself. You know
that there is nothing it won’t dare to do at such a time, free of all control by shame
or reason. It doesn’t shrink from trying to have sex with a mother, as it supposes,
or with anyone else at all, whether man, god, or beast. It will commit any foul
murder, and there is no food it refuses to eat. In a word, it omits no act of folly
or shamelessness... On the other hand, I suppose that someone who is healthy
and moderate with himself goes to sleep only after having done the following:
First, he rouses his rational part and feasts it on fine arguments and speculations;
second, he neither starves nor feasts his appetites, so that they will slumber and
not disturb his best part with either their pleasure or their pain, but they’ll leave
it alone, pure and by itself, to get on with its investigations, to yearn after and
perceive something... whether it is past, present or future; third, he soothes his
spirited part in the same way, for example, by not falling asleep with his spirit still
aroused after an outburst of anger. And when he has quieted these two parts and
aroused the third, in which reason resides, and so takes rest, you know that it is
then that he best grasps the truth and that the visions that appear in his dreams
are least lawless.^13
As for Aristotle, the view that in sleep our souls regain their ‘proper nature’
seems, at best, to have been a Platonic relic appealing to him in his early
years, soon to be abandoned in favour of his characteristic ‘hylomorphic’
theory of the soul as the formal aspect of the natural soul–body composite
that makes up a living being.^14 In this view, soul and body are jointly
affected by experiences (path ̄e) such as sleep; but how this works out with
regard to whether our sleeping lives somehow reflect our waking lives, is
not immediately obvious. Thus a passage in Aristotle’sNicomachean Ethics
presents a certain ambivalence:
(^11) Apollonius,Mirabilia 3 ; see the discussion by Bremmer ( 1983 ) 24 – 53.
(^12) For a discussion of the fragments from his lost worksOn PhilosophyandEudemussee van der Eijk
( 1994 ) 89 – 93.
(^13) Plato,Republic 571 c ff., tr. Grube and Reeve ( 1997 ) 1180.
(^14) See the discussion in van der Eijk ( 2000 b).