Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France  

"By the end of the century, a legal dictionary permitted itself some doubts about the bastardy case in which a woman claimed to have conceived a child by her husband, whom she had not seen for four years, during a dream. "It is supposed that the night of the lady of Aiguemerre's dream was a summer night, that her window was open, her bed exposed to the West, her blanket disarranged, and that the southwest wind, duly impregnated with organic molecules of human fetuses, of floating embryos, fertilized her.""--Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (1968) by Robert Darnton

"Science had captivated Mesmer's contemporaries by revealing to them that they were surrounded by wonderful, invisible forces: Newton's gravity, made intelligible by Voltaire; Franklin's electricity, popularized by a fad for lightning rods and by demonstrations in the fashionable lyceums and museums of Paris; and the miraculous gases of the Charlieres and Montgolfieres that astonished Europe by lifting man into the air for the first time in 1783."--Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (1968) by Robert Darnton