Dreams were in large part discounted as fanciful nonsense, perhaps because the nightly wanderings of an unchecked mind allowed for visions and experiences that sometimes went against religious dogma. In time, while some Western Christians continued to see dreams as divine gifts, others came to believe they were the work of demons. Perhaps most prominent was the thirteenth-century priest St. Thomas Aquinas, whose writings remain influential today, particularly in the Catholic church. Aquinas attempted to discount the possibility that dreams had special meaning, and attributed them to three different causes: waking experiences, physical sensations, and the work of God or demons. While he did not believe it was sinful to interpret the first two types of dreams, as earlier Christians had held, he did considered it "unlawful and superstitious" to derive meaning from dreams sent by demons.
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The prophet Muhammad (570632 A.D.), the Arabian founder of Islam to whom Moslems believe the Koran was dictated by God, considered dreams to have vital significance, and to have some bearing on the matters of waking life. He would inquire of his disciples every morning what their dreams were, discuss their interpretations, offer his own, and then recount his own dreams. According to Nathanial Bland, writing in
The New World of Dreams
, "By [one] dream attributed to him, the Sunnis justify the still-disputed rights of his three successors; and the origin of a strife, political and religious, which convulsed the whole Muhammaden empire and threatened its destruction, and which still divides the followers of Islam by a schismatic and irreconcilable hatred, is founded on a revelation made to its founder Muhammad in his sleep." Some of the followers of Muhammad question whether his revelations occurred in dreams, arguing that such a highly evolved mind would not have a dividing line between the "conscious" and ''unconscious."
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