It appears that at Dijon a learned man had struggled all day
with a key passage from a greek poet without being able to understand it.
Tired and annoyed by the fruitlessness of his long effort, he finally went to bed.
While deep in sleep, a dream apparently decided to solve the problem:
his spirit was transported to Stockholm, where he was introduced
into the palace of the queen and led into her library...
Looking at all the books, his eyes falls upon a small volume which he opens.
After glancing through ten or twelve pages, he runs across ten lines of greek verse
that completely resolves the difficulty which have troubled him for so long.
The joy he fiels at this discovery wakes him up.
(He repeated the verses contunually, and then wrote them down
on a scrap of paper so that he would not forget them.)
The next morning, he thought about this nocturnal adventure,
one of the most extraordinary of his life, and sent a letter to Descartes...
to inquire if the queen's library, her palace, and the city
were such as he had seen them in his dream.
He asked him to look for the volume he had read to see if it did indeed exist,
and if it contained the ten lines of greek quoted at the end of the letter.
Descartes was quick to answer...
telling him that evven the most talented engineer could not have described
the plan of the city more correctly, that the library was exactly as he had depicted it,
and that he had found the book in question and had read the verses.
Even though the book was extremely rare, one of his friends
had promised to obtain a copy which he would send to Dijon
as soon as possible as a token of his esteem.
The story ends here, and there is no further correspondence. It was recounted
in books published during both the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
and while it remains one of those curious sidelights that literary historians employ
to entertain their students, no attempt at a rational explanation has ever been given.
Vrooman 1970, 235-36 (as told in Jack Vrooman's biography René Descartes).
News
Introduction
Boat of everything. Mircea Eliades dream
Descartes 3 dreams. November 10, 1619
Dr Jekyll and mr Hyde. Robert Louis Stevenson
Fantastic voyage. A long and twisted tale
Keules chemical dream. A vision of benzenes structure
Lincolns premonition. Who is dead in the White House?
Mary Shelleys dream. First vision of Frankenstein
Parallel world. Traffic accident on the hyperway
Swedish library. The unknown book
The sky, the Sun and the Ocean. The word for world is water
Vision without words. An experiment with Burroughs
Whitmans trance. My favourite trees
A3 Poster. Get all dreams on print
Quotes
Links
"Nightmare" (1781) by Henry Fuseli
"Dream" (1910 by Henri Rousseau, french post-impressionist