Science Quote by Paracelsus

Paracelsus is trying to rescue the dream from the junk drawer of superstition without stripping it of its strangeness. In the 16th century, dreams were either divine telegrams or demonic spam, and the rising prestige of empirical inquiry threatened to demote them to mere noise. His move is slyly expansive: wherever dreams come from, they are "not without meaning". He doesn’t claim they’re always prophetic or always psychological. He claims they’re interpretable.

The phrasing matters. "Not without meaning" is a careful hedge, the language of someone who knows certainty is expensive. It sounds like a scientist before modern methodology: comfortable with ambiguity, allergic to absolute dismissal. Then he opens the supply chain of inspiration: "fantasy" (the inner theater), "the elements" (the bodily and environmental conditions his era treated as medically real), "other inspiration" (a catch-all that keeps the door ajar for God, spirits, or forces not yet named). That triad is the whole Paracelsian project in miniature: braid imagination, nature, and the unseen into one explanatory rope.

Subtext: dreams are data, and the dreamer is a kind of instrument. Read properly, they can reveal something about the body, the world, or the soul; ignore them and you’re throwing away signals because you dislike the transmitter. Contextually, this lands in a period when medicine, alchemy, astrology, and theology still shared a crowded room. Paracelsus isn’t separating domains so much as policing arrogance: meaning can arrive by routes your preferred system doesn’t authorize.