This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The Body gathers four of the atlas's dream symbols, parts of the dreamer's own body rather than something encountered outside it, and teeth falling out is the best documented dream image in the whole ancient literature.
Artemidorus devotes a long section of his first book to teeth, mapping them onto the household, upper teeth its more important members and lower its lesser ones, incisors the young and molars the old, so losing a tooth foretells losing the person it stands for, by death, departure or estrangement, or else foretells a loss of property; a tooth kept differs from one lost, and a rotten tooth removed can be favourable. None of it concerns anxiety. Freud read the same image as displaced sexual material and connected it to castration, the hinge on which the whole history of the symbol turns, the image ceasing to be about the household and becoming about the dreamer instead.
Blood has an unusually cheerful Talmudic reading: undergoing bloodletting in a dream means one's transgressions have been forgiven, the routine medical procedure read as a purgation, while Artemidorus reads wounds and blood loss by site and severity as loss of property or family. Hair receives the same detailed, situational treatment from Artemidorus, favourable or unfavourable by the dreamer's own circumstances and differing for men, women and mourners, since shaving the head was itself a mourning practice; Freud grouped hair cutting and baldness among his images of castration, the same anxiety he read in falling teeth. Eyes, for Artemidorus, stand for the dreamer's children or, in some cases, brothers or what is most valued, so an eye's injury foretells harm to that person, his method throughout being to map the body onto the household rather than the dreamer's own inner state.