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DREAM DREBBEL 255 event as past. The faces of friends long dead and events long past rise before the mind with all the vividness of real existence, and fail to excite surprise by their incongruity, because, says Dr. Hartley, " we have no other reality to oppose to the ideas which offer themselves, whereas in the common fictions of the fancy, while we are awake, there is always a set of real external objects striking some of our senses and precluding a like mistake there Secondly, the trains of visible ideas which oc- cur in dreams are far more vivid than common visible ideas, and therefore may the more easily be taken for actual impressions." The popular belief that in dreams an insight is fre- quently given of coming events is shared by many well informed persons, and is supposed to be corroborated by many remarkable cases. Some of the instances recorded may be ex- plained by natural means. Franklin believed that he was instructed supernaturally in his dreams concerning the issue of current events. "He observed not," says Cabanis, "that his profound skill and rare sagacity continued to direct the action of his brain during sleep." The dream of Albumaron, the Arabian physi- cian, to whom his lately deceased friend sug- gested in his sleep " a very sovereign remedy for his sore eyes," is explicable in a similar way. But there are extraordinary instances which cannot be explained by any known natural laws. Many of these are so well au- thenticated that they cannot be discredited, however loath we may be to accord to them a supernatural origin. The earliest mention of dreams is in the Scriptures and in the poems of Homer, in both of which a supernatural origin is generally ascribed to them. By the ancients, indeed, dreams were almost univer- sally regarded as coming from the other world, and from both good and evil sources. A great number of instances are on record in the Greek and Latin classics of remarkable dreams. The night before the assassination of Julius Caesar, his wife Calpurnia dreamed that her husband fell bleeding across her knees. On the night that Attila died, the emperor Marcian at Con- stantinople dreamed that he saw the bow of the Hunnish conqueror broken asunder. Cicero relates a story of two Arcadians, who, travel- ling together, arrived at Megara and went to separate lodgings, one to an inn, the other to a private house. In the course of the night the latter dreamed that his friend appeared to him and begged for help because the innkeeper was preparing to murder him. The dreamer awoke, but, not considering the matter worthy of attention, went to sleep again. A second time his friend appeared, telling him that as- sistance would be too late, for the murder had already been committed. The murdered per- son also said that his body had been put into a cart and covered with manure, and that an attempt would be made to take it out of the city the next morning. The dreamer went to the magistrates and had the cart searched, 273 VOL. vi. 17 when the body was found and the murderer brought to justice. Dreams were even allowed to influence legislation. During the Marsic war (90 B. C.) the Roman senate ordered the temple of Juno Sospita to be rebuilt in con- sequence of a dream of Caecilia Metella, the wife of the consul Appius Claudius Pulcher. Some of the fathers of the Christian church attached considerable importance to dreams. Tertullian thought they came from God as one species of prophecy, though many dreams may be attributed to the agency of demons. He believed that future honors and dignities, medical remedies, thefts, and treasures had been occasionally revealed by dreams. St. Augustine relates a dream by which Genna- dius, a Carthaginian physician, was convinced of the immortality of the soul, by the appari- tion to him in his sleep of a young man, who reasoned with him on the subject, and argued that as he could see when his bodily eyes were closed in sleep, so he would find that when his bodily senses were extinct in death he would see and hear and feel with the senses of his spirit. Aristotle wrote a treatise on dreams (Hepi 'EwTrviuv), as did also Artemidorus and Astrampsychus. Of late works, Dr. W. B. Carpenter's "Physiology" may be consulted with advantage ; also Maury's Le sommeil et les reves (Paris, 1861) ; Brierre de Boismont's Des hallucinations, ou histoire raisonnee des apparitions, des visions, des songes, de Vex- tase, des reves, du magnetisme et du somnambu- lisme (Paris, 3d ed., 1861); and Maudsley's "Physiology and Pathology of the Mind" (London, 1867). DREBBEL, Cornells van, a Dutch philosopher and inventor, born in Alkmaar in 1572, died in London in 1 634. Of his life little is known ; but his inventive genius appears to have given him a wide reputation, for it is certain that when about 30 years of age he was in receipt of a pension from the emperor Rudolph II., granted him for scientific discoveries. He was also taken into favor by the future emperor Ferdinand II., and made tutor to his son. Seditious movements about the beginning of the thirty years' war led to his arrest; and he would have been executed but for the inter- cession of King James I. of England, who took him under his protection. He lived in Lon- don from 1620, devoted entirely to scientific labors. He invented several philosophical in- struments, among which, it is said, were the compound microscope and a thermometer con- sisting of a glass tube containing water con- nected with a bulb containing air. His con- temporaries say that he displayed to King James a glass globe in which by means of the four elements he had produced perpetual mo- tion, and that by means of machinery he imi- tated rain, thunder, lightning, and cold, and was able quickly to exhaust a river or lake. He discovered a bright scarlet dye for woollens and silks, which was introduced into France by the founders of the Gobelins manufactures.