When, in the fifth book of Paradise Lost, Eve reveals her unsettling dream, in which she saw herself eating the forbidden fruit at the prompting of a mysterious stranger, Adam dismisses it as an experience of no importance. Since her will was not involved, he believes, she incurred no guilt. His argument that the dream is without significance persuades her but not us, who have beheld Satan, during the couple's sleep, causing the dream in Eve in order to taint her faculties and perhaps to probe her weaknesses:
Squat like a Toad, close at the ear of Eve;
Assaying by his Devilish art to reach
The Organs of her Fancy, and with them forge
Illusions as he list, Phantasms and Dreams.
(IV, 800–03)