XCIII. Opinions on nocturnal fantasies.
There are those who say that such fantasies seem to appear to men from timidity and melancholy of mind, as is wont to happen in frenzied and suffering older men. Others assert that they see such imaginations in dreams so clearly that they seem to themselves to be awake, as Augustine relates in his book on the City of God that it happened to some; having confessed this;
But I am moved against this, because I recognize women who were our neighbors, who had preceded me in their days, who told me that they had seen their male and female clients uncovered with shame at night; They also related what was done by us at night in far-off parts; they sometimes spoke of unseen nocturnal scourgings of our little ones, and asserted that, while their husbands were sleeping, they crossed the sea with a company of vampires on swift wings, and traversed the world; and if anyone or anything in such discourse mentioned Christ, he immediately fell, in whatever place and in whatever danger he might be.
We have indeed seen in the kingdom of Arles, a woman from the castle of Bellicard, fall from a similar cause into the middle of the waves of the Rhone, and become wet up to her navel; she escaped in the middle of the night without danger to her life; but not without fear.
We know that certain women, seen in the form of cats by furtive watchmen at night and wounded, showed wounds and mutilated limbs the next day.
Facebook
Twitter