“A professor of rhetoric related a dream where, in a region high above the Earth, he had seen an assembly of individuals who were very respectable by virtue of their age and the dignity of their bearing. 'Luminous filaments emerged from their eyes and mouths,' he said, 'which extended to all the continents of our world, and which formed in the minds of other people, as so many moving pictures, agitating and speaking, by means of which they found themselves in a state to anticipate, to see and know what they could not anticipate, see or know in their ordinary situation.'”

Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, 1798