Classical Theory

Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy-three great masters of the English novel-are three remarkable imagining minds. As readers of their novels, we feel ourselves to be in contact with their authorial minds and conjure the minds they create spread across the pages of their narrative worlds. In the way that we believe in and hold in mind the idea that other human beings have minds of their own do we as readers of the novel believe we are in the presence of these other minds. But how?

In "On Prophesying by Dreams", Aristotle contemplates the insights that takes place during sleep. He believes that most prophetic dreams are coincidences. He claims that people often mention things during conversation that later come to pass, and argues this is the phenomenon which occurs in dreams.

"On Dreams" appears in Aristotle's Parva Naturalia. He examines questions like whether dreams pertain to the faculty of thought or to that of sense-perception. In part two, he considers the circumstances of sleep and the operation of the sense organs operate. In part three he attempts to explain how dreams arise, suggesting that it is the residual movements of the sensory organs that originate them.