restrain,
  Who follow Mercury, the god of gain;
  Let each man do as to his fancy seems,
  I wait, not I, till you have better dreams. 
  Dreams are but interludes which fancy makes;
  When monarch Reason sleeps, this mimic wakes: 
  Compounds a medley of disjointed things,
  A mob of cobblers, and a court of kings: 
  Light fumes are merry, grosser fumes are sad: 
  Both are the reasonable soul run mad:  330
  And many monstrous forms in sleep we see,
  That neither were, nor are, nor e’er can be. 
  Sometimes forgotten things, long cast behind,
  Rush forward in the brain, and come to mind. 
  The nurse’s legends are for truths received,
  And the man dreams but what the boy believed.

    Sometimes we but rehearse a former play,
  The night restores our actions done by day;
  As hounds in sleep will open for their prey. 
  In short, the farce of dreams is of a piece:  340
  Chimeras all; and more absurd, or less: 
  You, who believe in tales, abide alone;
  Whate’er I get this voyage is my own.

    Thus while he spoke, he heard the shouting crew
  That call’d aboard, and took his last adieu. 
  The vessel went before a merry gale,
  And for quick passage put on every sail: 
  But when least fear’d, and even in open day,
  The mischief overtook her in the way: 
  Whether she sprung a leak, I cannot find, 350
  Or whether she was overset with wind,
  Or that some rock below her bottom rent;
  But down at once with all her crew she went: 
  Her fellow ships from far her loss descried;
  But only she was sunk, and all were safe beside.

    By this example you are taught again,
  That dreams and visions are not always vain: 
  But if, dear Partlet, you are still in doubt,
  Another tale shall make the former out.

    Kenelm, the son of Kenulph, Mercia’s king, 360
  Whose holy life the legends loudly sing,
  Warn’d in a dream, his murder did foretell
  From point to point as after it befell: 
  All circumstances to his nurse he told,
  (A wonder from a child of seven years old): 
  The dream with horror heard, the good old wife
  From treason counsell’d him to guard his life;
  But close to keep the secret in his mind,
  For a boy’s vision small belief would find. 
  The pious child, by promise bound, obey’d, 370
  Nor was the fatal murder long delay’d: 
  By Quenda slain, he fell before his time,
  Made a young martyr by his sister’s crime. 
  The tale is told by venerable Bede,
  Which, at your better leisure, you may read.

    Macrobius, too, relates the vision sent
  To the great Scipio, with the famed event: 
  Objections makes, but after makes replies,
  And adds, that dreams are often prophecies.