The single most notorious passage in ancient dream interpretation concerns the mother. Artemidorus gives the dream of intercourse with one's mother one of the longest discussions in the Oneirocritica, distinguishing case after case and reading many of them favourably: the mother, he explains, can signify one's country, one's trade and the earth itself, so that for a politician or an exile the dream may promise standing or return. The passage matters here not for its conclusions but for its method, the mother read as the great symbol of origin, land and belonging rather than as a person only, and for the reminder that ancient interpreters were far less shockable than their modern readers.
Depth psychology made the mother its central figure. Freud set the Oedipal bond at the base of his whole theory, and dream mothers in his school are read with that weight. Jung broke with him partly over exactly this, arguing the mother of dream and myth is more than the personal parent: his essay on the psychological aspects of the mother archetype ranges her images from the nurturing to the devouring, and Erich Neumann's The Great Mother catalogued the type across cultures, womb and tomb together.
The working readings inherit the split: the dream mother as the actual woman, with the dreamer's history supplying the sense, or as origin and care itself, wherever those now operate. The traditions are recorded here as traditions, the ancient one included.