More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
The name Demonology covers dreams, omens, coincidences, luck, sortilege, magic, and other experiences which shun rather than court inquiry, and
deserve notice chiefly because every man has usually in a lifetime two or three hints in this kind which are specially impressive to him.
the astonishment remains that one should dream;
Dreams are jealous of being remembered; they dissipate instantly and angrily if you try to hold them.
A dislocation seems to be the foremost trait of dreams. A painful imperfection almost always attends them.
There is one memory of waking and another of sleep.
This feature of dreams deserves the more attention from its singular resemblance to that obscure yet startling experience which almost every person confesses in day light, that particular passages of conversation and action have occurred to him in the same order before, whether dreaming or waking; a suspicion that they have been with precisely these persons in precisely this room, and heard precisely this dialogue, at some former hour, they know not when.
We fear lest the poor brute should gain one dreadful glimpse of his condition, should learn in some moment the tough limitations of this fettering organization.
Calidasa of his transmigration of souls.
Look this up later
What keeps those wild tales in circulation for thousands of years? What but the wild fact to which they suggest some approximation of theory?
You think, could the man overlook his own condition, he could not be restrained from suicide.
Reread this paragraph in general
My dreams are not me; they are not Nature, or the Not-me: they are both. They have a double consciousness, at once sub-and objective. We call the phantoms that rise, the creation of our fancy, but they act like mutineers, and fire on their commander; showing that every act, every thought, every cause, is bipolar, and in the act is contained the counteraction.
Sleep takes off the costume of circumstance, arms us with terrible freedom, so that every will rushes to a deed.
Goethe said: “These whimsical pictures, inasmuch as they originate from us, may well have an analogy with our whole life and fate.”
Indeed, all productions of man are so anthropomorphous that not possibly can he invent any fable that shall not have a deep moral and be true in senses and to an extent never intended by the inventor.
“Nature,” said Swedenborg, “makes almost as much demand on our faith as miracles do.”
The demonologic is only a fine name for egotism; an exaggeration namely of the individual, whom it is Nature’s settled purpose to postpone.
Dreams are a solitary venture, concerning only the individual (ego), whereas nature concerns the multitude
Before we acquire great power we must acquire wisdom to use it well.
There is as precise and as describable a reason for every fact occurring to him, as for any occurring to any man.
While the dilettanti have been prying into the humors and muscles of the eye, simple men will have helped themselves and the world by using their eyes.
somnambulist.
But as Nature can never be outwitted, as in the Universe no man was ever known to get a cent’s worth without paying in some form or other the cent, so this prodigious promiser ends always and always will, as sorcery and alchemy have done before, in very small and smoky performance.
the numberless forms in which this superstition has re-appeared in every time and every people indicates the inextinguishableness of wonder in man, betrays his conviction that behind all your explanations is a vast and potent and living Nature, inexhaustible and sublime, which you cannot explain.
The whole world is an omen and a sign. Why look so wistfully in a corner? Man is the Image of God. Why run after a ghost or a dream? The voice of divination resounds everywhere and runs to waste unheard, unregarded, as the mountains echo with the bleatings of cattle.
