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Dream Symbols
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The recurring images of dream interpretation (falling, teeth, water, flight, being chased), as the interpretive traditions read them. Dream books are ancient and widespread, from the Egyptian and Mesopotamian dream omens through Artemidorus's Oneirocritica to the modern psychoanalytic and popular literature, and they disagree with each other substantially. The entries record what a tradition says a symbol means, which is a different thing from what a dream means.
Facts
Origins
Whose Classification This IsReading dream images as expressions of the unconscious is a scheme of the twentieth-century psychological schools, beginning with Freud in 1900. It is a different enterprise from the omen-books, which read the same images as signs of what is to come. 1 Attestation
Era of AttestationDream-omen books are attested in Egypt and Mesopotamia from the second millennium BCE; Artemidorus compiled the Oneirocritica in the second century CE. 2 Learn More
The Images of Dream Interpretation
This category holds the recurring images of dream interpretation (falling, flying, teeth, water, being chased, death), as the interpretive traditions read them. It is concerned with the symbolic content of dreams as codified in dream-books and interpretive systems, rather than with the science of sleep.
Dream interpretation is ancient and widespread. Egyptian and Mesopotamian dream-omen texts, the second-century Oneirocritica of Artemidorus, medieval Islamic and European dream-books, and the twentieth-century psychological theories of Freud and Jung all offer keys to what dream images mean.
Competing Keys
Traditions read dream images in quite different ways (as omens of the future, as messages from gods or the dead, as reflections of bodily state, or as expressions of the unconscious), and a single image can bear opposite meanings in different systems. The atlas records the readings various traditions give rather than proposing one true meaning.
Each entry gathers what the main interpretive traditions have made of a given image, from the ancient omen-books to the modern psychological schools, keeping their different assumptions in view. Dream interpretation as a method sits alongside the other divinatory systems.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Sources
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