(November 11, 1619) were to have a profound and lasting effect upon Descartes. He believed that this vision and the ensuing dreams had revealed to him his God-given vocation. They were to give him a much-needed confidence in his calling as well as in the correctness of its findings that was not always backed by argument. But for this experience, the brilliant dilettante might never have realized his vocation. It is ironic that Descartes, the great rationalist, should have found his inspiration in a mystical vision and highly irrational dreams. This element in Descartes’s thinking is often overlooked in French lycées, where the great Gallic hero and hypnophile is held up as a rationalist exemplar.
Descartes’s dreams have attracted a wide variety of explanations. According to the Dutch philosopher and astronomer Huygens, who was later to correspond with Descartes, these dreams were the result of Descartes’s brain becoming overheated while he was in the stove. Others have suggested indigestion, overwork, lack of sleep, a mystical crisis, or the fact that he might recently have joined the Rosicrucians. The melon, whose offstage existence is alluded to in the first dream, apparently caused much mirth to eighteenth-century readers of Descartes’s biography. But with the advent of psychoanalysis, this melon became a much more serious matter.
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