Descartes: Philosophy in an Hour. Paul Strathern

stove. Others have suggested indigestion, overwork, lack of sleep, a mystical crisis, or the fact that he might recently have joined the Rosicrucians. The melon, whose offstage existence is alluded to in the first dream, apparently caused much mirth to eighteenth-century readers of Descartes’s biography. But with the advent of psychoanalysis, this melon became a much more serious matter.