By the end of the fourteenth century, debates over the significance of dreams had become so commonplace that even chickens had joined in. In Chaucer's “Nun's Priest's Tale,” Chauntecleer dreams that a beast looked like it wanted to kill him while he was walking in the barnyard. The rooster is so frightened in his sleep that his groans prompt one of his wives to ask what is the matter. Pertelote scoffs at his fear, maintains that dreams are nothing but vanities caused by humoral imbalance, selectively quotes Cato's Distichs against heeding dreams, and urges her husband to take a laxative. He counters with several examples of prophetic dreams and marshals his own authorities to maintain that “dremes be somtyme— I sey nat alle— | Warnynge of thynges that shul after falle” (Canterbury Tales 7.3131– 2). But, fondly overcome with female charm, he ignores everything that he has just said and flies off his perch. Fortunately, he manages to trick the inevitable fox into releasing him, for, like so many dreams scoffed at in literature, this one accurately predicts the future.

Demonic Dreams

The comically gallant resolution of the debate between Chauntecleer and Pertelote reflects a serious dilemma confronting Christians in the Middle Ages. Is it permissible to pay attention to dreams? If so, how does one recognize dreams that have been sent by God? These questions became more pressing owing to the widespread belief that many or most dreams were sent by the devil. Given this frightening possibility and the difficulties of distinguishing the various kinds of dreams, many authorities prohibited heeding any dreams at all— at least in theory.

The message that “destructive Dream” delivers from Zeus to Agamemnon shows, from the beginning of Greek literature, that a god can deliberately deceive with a dream (Iliad 2.1– 34), and the godsent dream that threatens Xerxes with loss of his kingdom if he does not invade Greece misleads him to disaster (Herodotus 7.12– 14). But before the spread of Christianity, dream theorists and interpreters are much more interested in deciding which kinds of dreams foretell the future than worried about being deliberately deceived by godsent dreams. Plato's Socrates maintains that the gods do not lie and criticizes Homer for saying that Zeus sent a deceptive dream, and Porphyry, Proclus and Synesius exonerate Zeus and Homer by arguing that Agamemnon misinterprets the dream (see p. 26).