About Dreamlore

A comparative encyclopedia of dream symbols: what five great interpretive traditions said, side by side, with the last word left to you.

What Dreamlore is

Humanity has been writing down dream interpretations for about four thousand years, and for most of that time the books have disagreed with each other. A snake is an enemy in one tradition and a fortune in another; a dog is a friend in Ephesus and an adversary in Basra. Most modern dream dictionaries flatten this argument into a single confident sentence. Dreamlore does the opposite: it keeps the argument.

Every symbol on this site is read through five traditions in turn — the omen literature of Mesopotamia and Egypt, the classical world of Artemidorus, the interpretation school of the early Islamic centuries, the dream manuals and folk lore of China, Europe and Anatolia, and the modern line that runs from Freud and Jung into the sleep laboratory. We put them side by side, note where they converge and where they quarrel, and let the reader decide which voice, if any, speaks to their dream. The disagreements are not a flaw in the record. They are the record — and often they are the most interesting part.

The sources we lean on

Dreamlore is a work of popular synthesis, not original scholarship, and it stands on well-known shoulders. Loosely and honestly, the shelf behind these pages holds:

• The Assyrian dream omens, studied and translated in the scholarship of A. Leo Oppenheim;
• The Oneirocritica of Artemidorus of Daldis, the classical world's great surviving dream manual;
• The interpretation literature attributed to Ibn Sirin and the school that grew around his name;
• The Zhougong jiemeng, China's household dream book, in its many editions;
• Collected European and Anatolian folklore, from village death-omens to fireside rules of thumb;
• Freud's Interpretation of Dreams and Jung's writings on symbols and the psyche;
• Contemporary research on typical dreams, REM sleep and dream recall.

Where a tradition's record is thin — the classical world barely mentions cats, for instance — we say so rather than inventing. Attributions are hedged on purpose: much of this literature accreted over centuries under famous names, and "the interpretations attributed to Ibn Sirin" is the honest phrasing, not a hedge of convenience. We paraphrase rather than fabricate quotations, and when a story is legend — a sultan's dream, a queen's white elephant — we present it as legend.

What we are not

Dreamlore is not fortune-telling. We report what interpreters believed, not what your dream foretells; the old books predicted harvests and enemies with total confidence and no evidence, and we pass their verdicts along as cultural history, not prophecy. We are not medical, psychological or religious advice — if a dream is part of something heavier, a clinician or a scholar of your own tradition is the right door, and we treat the religious material on these pages with the respect due to living faiths. And we are not the authority on your dream. Nobody is. Artemidorus himself insisted that the same dream means different things in different lives; on that point, at least, the whole quarrelsome library agrees. The dream belongs to the dreamer.

The best way in is simply to begin: pick a symbol you've dreamed from the symbol index, and see what forty centuries of interpreters made of it.