This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Actions gathers eight of the atlas's dream symbols, the things a dreamer does or that happen to them rather than the things they see, and the group is unusually good evidence for how dream interpretation works: every entry carries readings from at least two unrelated traditions, and the traditions rarely agree.
Falling, flying and being chased are the most heavily documented. Artemidorus reads falling by the dreamer's social station, flying by height, wings and country, and pursuit through the pursuing animal rather than the chase itself, while Freud traced falling to childhood play and flight to erotic feeling. The now standard readings, that falling means loss of control and the pursuer is a rejected part of the self, are specifically psychoanalytic and Jungian rather than ancient.
Birth and death run in opposite directions across the sources: the Talmud and Artemidorus both treat them as omens read by circumstance, favourable for one dreamer and ruinous for another, while the modern reading of both as symbolic transformation, a new project or a needed ending, has no ancient warrant and is a twentieth-century reassurance.
Drowning has no traceable older tradition at all; the classical sources treat shipwreck as material loss rather than a state of mind, and its modern reading as being emotionally overwhelmed follows the metaphor already carried by the English verb. Nakedness in public is read by the Talmud according to where the dreamer stands and by Artemidorus according to company, and Freud gave it a chapter tracing the anxiety to early childhood. The exam or test dream is the rare case with no older reading whatsoever, since formal examinations are a modern institution; Freud discussed it directly as consolation rather than warning.