The Literal Meaning of Genesis (continued)
saw them in his sleep he was not able to distinguish them from corporeal objects seen in his waking hours? Still I know from my own experience (and for that reason I do not doubt that others could have had or can have the same experience also) that while seeing an object in sleep I was aware that I was dreaming. I was fully convinced, even in my sleep, that the images which ordinarily deceive the imagination were not real bodies but only the phantasies of a dream. Sometimes, however, I have been misled in my attempts to persuade a friend whom I saw in a dream that the objects we were seeing were not bodies but only the images of dreamers—all the while he himself appeared among them as a mere dream image. Still I would tell him it was not true that we were even speaking to one another, and I would say that he at that moment was seeing something else in his sleep and that he had no knowledge at all of the fact that I was seeing these objects. But whenever I made an effort to persuade him that he was not real, I was partly inclined to believe that he was, since I should not be speaking to him if I really felt that he was not real. Hence my soul, which in some mysterious way was awake while I slept, was necessarily affected by the images of bodies, just as if they were real bodies.*
4. With regard to ecstasies, I once had the opportunity of listening to the account of a certain man, a peasant, who had been in such a state but who could not accurately describe his experience.5 He knew that he was awake and was seeing something, though not with the eyes of the body. To use his own words, as far as I can recall them, he said: "My soul saw him, not my eyes." However, he did not know whether it was a body or the image of a body, for he was unable to make such a distinction. But he was such a simple and trustworthy man that hearing him was for me just as convincing as seeing for myself the vision he narrated.
5. Hence, if Paul saw Paradise as Peter saw the dish sent from heaven; as John, what he described in the Apocalypse; as Ezekiel, the plain with the bones of the dead and their resurrection; as Isaiah, God seated and before Him the seraphim and the altar from which the live coal was taken to cleanse the lips of the