Oneiromancy

Oneiromancy is the interpretation of dreams as omens or messages that reveal the future or disclose hidden truths, resting on the ancient and widespread belief that dreams carry meaning, from a god, the spirits, the dead, or the deeper self, encoded in symbols that a skilled interpreter can unlock. It is among the oldest of the divinatory arts.

Mesopotamian scribes compiled dream-omen manuals (the Assyrian "Dream Book"); the Egyptians kept dream-keys; the Hebrew Bible gives dream-interpretation a starring role in the stories of Joseph, who reads Pharaoh's dreams of the fat and lean cattle, and Daniel at the Babylonian court; and Greek and Roman antiquity produced the most famous of all dream-manuals, the Oneirocritica of Artemidorus of Daldis, a systematic second-century guide to the meaning of dream-symbols that already distinguished predictive dreams from those merely reflecting the dreamer's state.

Temples of the healing god Asclepius practised dream-incubation, in which the sick slept in the sanctuary to receive a curative or diagnostic dream. This tradition of reading dreams as objective messages was profoundly reoriented in the modern era by psychology: Freud's Interpretation of Dreams recast the dream not as a message about the outer future but as a disguised expression of the dreamer's own unconscious wishes, and Jung read dream-symbols as communications from deeper layers of the psyche. Oneiromancy thus stands at the crossroads of divination and psychology, the age-old conviction that dreams mean something, interpreted first as prophecy and later as a window on the self.

The dream book is one of the oldest continuously produced genres in this atlas, and its form barely changes: a list of things that may be dreamed, and what each portends.

Egyptian examples survive on papyrus. Mesopotamian omen collections treat dreams alongside other signs. The fullest surviving classical work is the Oneirocritica of Artemidorus, written in the second century AD, and it is more sophisticated than its imitators: Artemidorus insists that the same image means different things for different dreamers, and that the interpreter must know the dreamer's occupation, status and habits before ruling. Islamic dream interpretation developed a large literature of its own, much of it circulating under the name of an early authority, and it is taken seriously as a discipline rather than treated as a diversion.

All of this treats the dream as a message from outside, whether from a god, from the future, or from the state of the world.

The modern turn reversed the direction. From the end of the nineteenth century the dream was read as a message from within, produced by the dreamer's own mind, and the interpreter's job became the recovery of what the dreamer already contained. Freud and Jung disagreed about almost everything else and agreed on that.

The printed dream dictionary sold today is a survival of the older genre inside the newer assumption, offering fixed meanings for symbols while describing them as personal.