A Greek couplet by Dionysius Cato, a Latin moralist living in the third century after Christ, runs as follows: 'Set no store by dreams; for the human soul sees in sleep as a true fact that which it desires in its waking hours.' This, written in an age of religious superstition, denies all prophetic and metaphysical significance to dreams and anticipates by fifteen hundred years Freud's scientific analysis of them.