This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Places gathers nine of the atlas's dream symbols, somewhere a dreamer goes rather than something seen, and the group splits between sites the older traditions read and ones they left untouched.
The house carries the richest history. Freud figured the whole body as a house, smooth walls standing for men and projections and balconies for women, while the house as an image of the entire psyche, upper floors as consciousness and cellar as what is buried, traces to one source, a dream Jung reported of his own descending through a house into a Roman cellar and a prehistoric cave. Artemidorus reads a house materially, as the dreamer's estate, and the Talmud reads climbing to a roof as rising to greatness, the same ascent Freud gave stairs, treating climbing as a figure for the sexual act. Forest and mountain both carry a specific Talmudic reading: entering a forest signifies becoming head of the advanced students, and mountains sit among the ambiguous signs whose bad reading can be averted by reciting a verse.
Door, bridge, cave, garden and road have no traceable older tradition of their own. None appear among the Talmudic dream signs and no classical reading survives, though each carries weight elsewhere: thresholds in the anthropology of ritual, the Chinvat bridge of Zoroastrian eschatology, caves as oracular sites and places of incubation where sleepers sought a dream rather than had one, and the garden as paradise in Eden and the Quran. Their dictionary readings, opportunity or obstacle, transition, hidden depths of the psyche, cultivation of the inner life, restate those waking associations or the plain metaphor of life as a journey without declaring the borrowing.