 To put it Sanchean terms, indicative signs are helpful when they refer to particular things (rerum) in the world; and they are unhelpful when they refer to the dogmatic notion of universals. Just as Carmen de Cometa/Poem of the Comet was written to dispel the notion of comets as signs of bad things to come, De divinatione per somnum, ad Aristotelem, rejects the idea that any knowledge can be attained by way of demonic states, prophecies, or dreams. In John Owen’s quirky but insightful book, The Skeptics of the French Renaissance, one of the characters of the dialogue says at the very beginning of the chapter on Sanches that 