Arcana Coelestia (Elliott) n. 1980

Previous Number Next Number Next Translation See Latin 

1980. It is worth mentioning that when I have woken up and have related what I had seen in a dream, and this has entailed a length of detail, certain angelic spirits, other than those referred to above, would at that point say that such details were in exact agreement with and identical with the things which they had been talking about, and that absolutely nothing was different. Nevertheless it was not the actual details of their conversation but the representatives of those details into which their ideas were thus converted and changed in the world of spirits, for angels' ideas are transformed in the world of spirits into representatives. Consequently every single thing which they discussed was so represented in the dream. They went on to say that the same discussion could have been transformed into other representations, and indeed with endless variation into either similar or dissimilar ones. The reason they had been transformed into the representations seen in my dream lay in the state of the spirits surrounding me and therefore lay in my own state at the time. In short, very many different dreams may come down and present themselves from the same discussion and so from a single source: The reason for this, as has been stated, is that the things in a person's memory and affection are recipient vessels, in which ideas are varied and are received as representatives according to the variations in form which those ideas take and according to the changes of state which they undergo.


This page is part of the Writings of Emanuel Swedenborg

© 2000-2001 The Academy of the New Church