Freud's Ancient Predecessor

The Oneirocritica survived the long transmission from antiquity in reasonably complete form, unusual for a technical divinatory manual of its period, and that survival gave it an afterlife well beyond the practicing dream diviners it was originally written for. Sigmund Freud named Artemidorus directly in the opening pages of his own The Interpretation of Dreams in 1899, acknowledging him as antiquity's most thorough attempt at systematic dream interpretation even while building a psychoanalytic method Freud considered fundamentally different in its account of what dreams actually reveal, unconscious wishes rather than externally predicted future events.

Later twentieth century scholarship found other uses for the text entirely apart from the history of dream theory. Michel Foucault, in the third volume of his History of Sexuality, read the Oneirocritica's extensive catalog of sexual dream imagery as valuable evidence for ordinary Greco-Roman attitudes toward sexual conduct, social status and gender roles, on the reasoning that a dream manual meant to be practically useful to real clients had to reflect widely shared cultural assumptions about what different sexual acts and relationships meant to different kinds of people, making it an unusually rich, if indirect, historical source for everyday ancient social attitudes rather than only for the history of divination.