Oneirocritica

What it is

Artemidorus's Oneirocritica — "The Interpretation of Dreams" — written in Greek in the second century CE, in five books.

Books I to III were written for a general readership and are organised as a systematic survey. Books IV and V were addressed to the author's son and marked as private: supplementary method, and a collection of case histories.

The organisation of the public books is essentially a topical catalogue, working through the material a dream might contain: birth and the body, head to foot; clothing; eating and drinking; bathing; sex; exercise and competition; travel; weather; animals; gods and religious ritual; death.

Where it came from

Artemidorus assembled it from three sources: everything he could find that had already been written on dreams; his travels collecting dreams from working interpreters and ordinary people across the eastern Mediterranean; and, distinctively, follow-up on what happened to the dreamers afterwards.

How it is read

As a manual, it is a system for reading images against the dreamer's circumstances. The interpretive engine runs on resemblance, social custom and — very heavily — wordplay. A dream means what it means partly because the Greek word for the dreamed thing resembles the Greek word for the outcome.

This is why the book is stranger in translation than in the original, and why some entries look arbitrary to an English reader. The pun has been lost; only the verdict remains.

As a historical source, it has become far more valuable than as a manual, and for a reason Artemidorus would have found bewildering. Because he was cataloguing what people actually dreamt, and because a dream's meaning depended on the dreamer's exact social position, he had to specify those positions constantly — and in doing so recorded a mass of ordinary detail that almost no other ancient text preserves.

The result is a survey of second-century anxieties: debt, litigation, shipwreck, the health of children, the behaviour of slaves, whether a business will succeed, whether an inheritance will come, what the neighbours think. It documents occupations, household structures, legal vulnerabilities and status distinctions from the inside, incidentally.

Book I's long treatment of sexual dreams is the most studied portion, because it classifies sexual acts by social relation and by who is active — the structure Michel Foucault analysed in The Care of the Self. It is one of the primary sources for how sexuality was actually conceptualised in the Roman-era Greek world, and it exists only because Artemidorus needed to tell interpreters what dreaming about your mother portended for a man in business.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the survival is a matter of luck and the book is close to unique. Other dream manuals existed in quantity; this is the one that came through.

We can say the method is more sophisticated than the genre it founded. Artemidorus filters out dreams that merely reflect appetite, insists on the dreamer's context, and refuses fixed meanings for images — all things the modern dream dictionary abandoned.

We can say the predictive claim is unsupported, and that his case histories cannot establish it. He learned about outcomes that were worth mentioning, which is a selection mechanism, not a record.

We can say the book is genuinely enjoyable to read, which is not something this site can say about much of its source material. It is opinionated, gossipy, occasionally exasperated, and full of people.

We cannot say how representative it is of ancient practice. Artemidorus was a professional with strong views who disparaged much of what his contemporaries did, so what survives is one careful practitioner's version of a much larger and messier trade.

Further reading

• Martin Hammond's translation (Oxford World's Classics, 2020) — the most accessible modern edition, with notes explaining the puns.
• Peter Thonemann, An Ancient Dream Manual (2020) — a historian's guide to the book and its world.