Myth & Folklore
Artemidorus and the second-century dream manual that is still in print
The Oneirocritica catalogues thousands of dreams and their outcomes. Its method is more sophisticated than anything that followed it for seventeen centuries, and Freud read it closely.
Artemidorus of Daldis, writing in the second century CE, produced five books on dream interpretation that survive substantially intact. The Oneirocritica is the most complete ancient work on the subject and remains in print, which is unusual for a technical manual eighteen centuries old.
He was not a philosopher or a physician. He was a professional interpreter, and he describes his method as empirical: he travelled, collected dreams and their outcomes, and interrogated practitioners. He claims to have bought every book on the subject he could find and to have spent years attending festivals to gather cases.
The classification
Artemidorus distinguishes two fundamental categories, and the distinction is doing real work.
Enhypnion — dreams caused by the dreamer's present bodily or emotional state. The hungry man dreams of food, the frightened man of what he fears, the lover of the beloved. These are not predictive and are of no interest to the interpreter. He is explicit that they should be set aside.
Oneiros — dreams that signify something about the future. These are the professional material.
The first category is a recognisable anticipation of what we would now call continuity: dreams reflecting waking concerns. Artemidorus identified the phenomenon and, unlike almost everyone since, treated it as the boring case rather than the interesting one.
He further divides predictive dreams into theorematic — which come true literally, as dreamt — and allegorical, which require decoding. Most of the book concerns the second.
Artemidorus insists repeatedly that the same image means different things to different dreamers. Interpretation must account for the dreamer's occupation, wealth, health, age, social status, whether they are free or enslaved, and their habits. A dream of ploughing means one thing to a farmer and another to a man with no land.
This is a considerably more sophisticated position than the fixed-symbol dream dictionaries that dominated the following seventeen centuries — and than most of what is sold today.
How he reasons
The interpretive logic is largely associative and linguistic, which is either its charm or its weakness depending on how much you want it to be a science.
Wordplay is central. Images are linked to outcomes through puns, etymology and metaphorical resemblance, in Greek — which means many of his interpretations are untranslatable and make no sense in English without a note.
Analogy does the rest. The head signifies the father, because it rules the body. The foot signifies slaves and servants, because they support. The right hand signifies father, son, friend, brother; the left, wife, mother, mistress. Losing teeth relates to loss in the household — the same association found in Mesopotamian omen texts a thousand years earlier and in folk belief today.
Social status modifies everything. Dreaming of being crucified is good for a poor man, since he will be raised up and made conspicuous, and disastrous for a rich one.
The material is extraordinary as social history
Whatever one thinks of the interpretations, the book is a remarkable record of what second-century people dreamed about and what they feared.
Money, litigation, illness, travel, shipwreck, slavery and manumission, marriage, childbirth, inheritance, the favour of patrons. The Book Four discussion of dreams about sex is unusually frank and has been mined extensively by historians of ancient sexuality — Michel Foucault devoted a substantial section of The Care of the Self to it, precisely because it reveals the assumed social logic rather than the philosophical ideal.
His epistemology, which is oddly modern
Artemidorus is not credulous in the way one expects. He warns against forcing interpretations. He acknowledges that interpreters disagree. He notes that some dreams cannot be interpreted. He emphasises collecting outcomes to test whether an interpretation was correct.
He also has a robustly practical view of the enterprise. He is training his son, to whom Book Four and Five are addressed, in a profession — and much of the advice is about how to work with clients, what to ask them, and how to avoid embarrassing errors.
Book Five consists of ninety-five case reports: a dream, and what subsequently happened. It is, in form if not in rigour, an outcome register.
The afterlife
The Oneirocritica was transmitted through the Byzantine world and translated into Arabic in the ninth century, where it influenced the substantial Islamic tradition of dream interpretation. It returned to Western Europe via Latin translation in the sixteenth century and was printed repeatedly.
Freud read it and cites Artemidorus in The Interpretation of Dreams, noting with approval the emphasis on wordplay and on the dreamer's individual circumstances — both of which appear, transformed, in his own method.
What to take from it
Not the interpretations. The predictions are unfalsifiable, the outcomes are reported by the interpreter, and the whole system rests on Greek puns.
What survives is the principle he stated most clearly and that has been most consistently ignored: that a dream image has no meaning independent of the person who dreamed it. Anyone selling you a table of fixed meanings is offering something that a professional dream interpreter in the second century would have regarded as amateurish.
