על החלומות, ספר ב כ״גOn Dreams, Book II 23
א׳
1[155] Here we may conclude our close study of the dreams of vainglory. As for gluttony it has two forms—drinking and eating, and the spicings and the flavourings needed are by no means simple in the former, but innumerable in the latter. These are entrusted to two caretakers: the liquor treated with nicety to a chief butler, the more elaborate edibles to a chief baker.
ב׳
2[156] There is a carefully considered meaning in describing the dreams as appearing to both these in a single night. They both aim at serving the same need, for it is not simple nutrition which they prepare but nutrition accompanied with pleasure and delight. And though the labour of each deals with but a half of nutrition they are both concerned with the whole:
ג׳
3[157] each half attracts the other, for after eating men at once desire to drink and after drinking no less quickly to eat, and this is one of the chief reasons for assigning the same time to the dreams of both.
ד׳
4[158] Now the province of the chief butler is drunkenness and of the chief baker gluttony. Each in his vision sees what fits his trade, wine and the parent plant of wine, the vine, in the first case, in the second loaves of the finest meal disposed on baskets which the baker saw himself carrying (Gen. 40:16, 17).
ה׳
5[159] It would be well to examine the former dream first. It runs as follows: “In my sleep there was a vine over against me, and on the vine were three stalks, and itself was blossoming having put forth shoots. The grapes in the cluster were ripe, and Pharaoh’s cup was in my hand, and I took the cluster and squeezed it into the cup and I gave the cup into Pharaoh’s hand” (Gen. 40:9–11).
ו׳
6[160] The prefacing with the words “in my sleep” is as striking as the words are true. For indeed he who gives way to the intoxication which is of folly rather than of wine bears a grudge against upright standing and wakefulness, and lies prostrate and sprawling like sleepers with the eyes of his soul closed, unable to see or hear aught that is worth seeing or hearing.
ז׳
7[161] And thus brought low, as he passes through life he finds no road but a pathless tract where neither eye nor hand can guide him. He is pierced by brambles and thorn-bushes and sometimes rolls over precipices or charges into others, bringing miserable destruction both to himself and them.
ח׳
8[162] And that deep and abysmal sleep which holds fast all the wicked robs the mind of true apprehensions, and fills it with false phantoms and untrustworthy visions and persuades it to approve of the blameworthy as laudable: thus in the present case the dreamer treats sorrow as a joy and does not perceive that the vine of his vision is the plant which 〈produces〉 folly and madness.
ט׳
9[163] “There was,” he said, “a vine before me” (Gen. 40:9), the wanted and the wanter, wickedness and the wicked, facing each other. That vine we fools till, little thinking that it is to our own harm, and we eat and drink its fruit, thus ranking it with both kinds of nutriment, a possession which proves to entail no half measure but a wholesale complete totality of mischief.