Rockets and rains of rocks

Last night I had a dream which I had occasion to relate to some online correspondents this afternoon, and I therefore have a written record of it, from which I quote:

We were on a mountain trail, with a wide view of farmland below. . . . I looked up in the sky and saw what I at first took to be a rocket in the distance but soon realized was actually a meteor. Smallish rocks began to rain down from the sky. I could see them striking the farmland below, and then one nearly [sic; I meant narrowly] missed me on the trail. "They're meteorites!" I shouted. "Everyone get out of the way!"

Later this evening, I read a bit in The Golden Thread of World History, a (rather bad) English translation of Alexandre Saint-Yves d'Alveydre's Mission des Juifs. Saint-Yves is arguing that the ancients had all sorts of "modern" technology, including rocketry. (Everything in the quote below is, it is my painful duty to inform you, strictly sic erat scriptum. I'll just get that out of the way now to avoid littering the text with sic after sic.)

About 4,000 years before Christ, . . . pyrotechnics were used solely for the defense of the temples and their domains . . . .

When strangers attacked the cities of Persia, says Philstratus, the Magi from the top of the walls stroke the assailants with flames and thunder.

By similar means the priests of Delphi defended their territory against the Gallics and the Persians themselves.

In their reports, Herodotus, Justin, Pausanias, describe actual explosions of mines engulfing Persians or Gallics under rains of stones and projectiles mixed with flames.

Both the dream and the passage in Saint-Yves feature rains of stones or rocks. Saint-Yves presents his "rains of stones" as evidence that the ancients used military "pyrotechnics"; my dream also connects the rain of stones with rocketry, since the meteor appears at first to be "a rocket in the distance."

I had not read anything about ancient weaponry in Saint-Yves before dreaming my dream, nor did I know that he would go on to discuss it. The similarity is therefore either precognitive or the work of the synchronicity fairies.