In On Prophesying on Dreams, Aristotle contemplates what he calls the divination that takes place during sleep and whether it caused by dreams. Since there is no known cause of this divination it is normal to be skeptical about it. It cannot come from a god because these experiences occur in common people and god does not communicate to them. So is it merely that dreams act as causes or tokens of divination? Indeed, it may be that some of these representations are the causes of actions cognate to them. We may think and plan some activity during the day whose significance causes a vivid dream at night. In this case the activity has paved the way for the dream. But the converse is also true, because thoughts which occur first in sleep may be the starting points of something that occurs when we are awake.
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