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As Descartes's third and final dream unfolded on the night of Nov. 10, 1619, he had been awakened twice, reacting to the previous two dreams in radically different ways. His response to the first dream was distinctly medieval; he intuitively understood the body as a site of struggle between powers greater than the "self," a metonymic field upon which forces of good and evil were arrayed in a contest that he could hope to influence only through prayer. His response to the second dream, however -- which in a conventional reading might be understood as the culmination of the first, the very "thunderbolts of heaven" he had feared -- might more productively be considered that of the rationalist interpreting a "phenomenon" as if from a distance and according to previous experience: Descartes "opened and closed his eyes in turn and observed what was represented to him." Descartes, Baillet tells us, observed that the third dream was distinguished from the first two in that it was not "frightful." Unlike the dizzying non sequiturs of the first and the visceral shock of the second, it unfolded meditatively; he found it "very soothing." It began with Descartes finding a book mysteriously placed on his table. He opened it and discovered that it was a dictionary, and at the same moment found a second book before him, this one a collection of poetry titled Corpus Poetarum. Opening this second book, he found the line: Quod vitae sectabor iter? (What road of life shall I follow?) He looked up to find a stranger before him; the man gave him yet another poem, this one on a separate page, that began: Est et Non (It is and is not). The visitor urged him to read it, and Descartes replied that he in fact knew the poem already; it was a poem by Ausonius in the Corpus Poetarum that he had just found on the table. Descartes even "boasted" of knowing the "order and scheme" of the Corpus "perfectly," and reopened the book to find the passage for the stranger. As he searched, the man asked where the Corpus had come from. Descartes did not know, but told the visitor that it had appeared on his table with another book, which -- Descartes noticed now -- had disappeared as quickly and mysteriously as it had appeared. At that moment the dictionary reappeared at the far end of his table, and Descartes -- still paging through the Corpus in his search for Est et Non -- stopped to note that the dictionary, while returned, was no longer as complete as the version that had first appeared. Pressing on, though, Descartes finally found the poems of Ausonius in the Corpus, but still could not locate the particular verse opening with Est et Non. Instead he promised the visitor an even better poem by Ausonius -- one that began with the line Quod vitae sectabor iter? The visitor begged to see the poem, and Descartes -- now seeking to salvage his claim of knowing the Corpus -- continued his search. But as he did, his attention was drawn by "several little portraits engraved by copperplate," which he found "very handsome." He realized that this was not the edition of the Corpus with which he was familiar. At the moment of that realization, the stranger and the two books disappeared. (10)
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