The history of dream interpretation

Why people have always tried to interpret dreams

Dream interpretation is one of the oldest practices we know of. Everyone dreams, and what we see in our sleep can be so vivid that it's hard not to look for meaning in it. For thousands of years, many cultures believed dreams carried messages from gods, from the dead or from the future, and they developed specialists, books and rituals to decode them.

Science sees dreams differently now, but that long history is still with us every time someone wakes up and wonders what a dream meant. Knowing it gives you context: a lot of the dream meanings floating around online are echoes of traditions that are centuries old.

Mesopotamia: the first dream books

In ancient Mesopotamia, dreams already show up in literature. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the hero has unsettling dreams before he meets Enkidu, and his mother, the goddess Ninsun, explains them to him: they announce the arrival of a companion.

Mesopotamians also compiled handbooks. The best known, now called Iškar Zaqīqu, is an eleven-tablet work in Akkadian that survived in fairly complete form in the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal at Nineveh, in the seventh century BCE. Most of its tablets list dreams and what they foretold; others hold rituals to ward off the effects of a bad dream. The Assyriologist A. Leo Oppenheim translated and studied it in 1956, and his work is still the standard reference.

Egypt: the Chester Beatty III papyrus

One of the oldest surviving dream books comes from Egypt. Known as Papyrus Chester Beatty III, it's now in the British Museum, which dates it to around 1220 BCE, in the time of Ramesses II. It's written in hieratic, the cursive script of scribes, and its language suggests it was first compiled centuries earlier, in the Middle Kingdom.

Its format is strikingly simple: "if a man sees himself in a dream doing such-and-such," followed by the word "good" or "bad" and what it meant. Some readings run opposite to what we'd expect; seeing yourself dead, for instance, was taken as a sign of a long life. The papyrus later belonged to the scribe Qenherkhepeshef, who copied other texts on its back.

Greece and Rome: Artemidorus of Daldis

In the Greek world, the big name is Artemidorus of Daldis, who lived in the second century CE. His Oneirocritica, in five books, is the oldest Greek treatise on dreams that survives complete. Artemidorus traveled widely, collected people's dreams and kept track of what happened to them afterward.

His most modern idea was that the same dream doesn't mean the same thing for everyone: the dreamer's age, work, health and circumstances all matter. That principle still holds up. Among his readings, losing teeth in a dream was linked to paying off debts. His book was copied and translated for centuries and fed many later dream dictionaries.

The Bible and the Talmud: dreams as messages

In the Bible, dreams are often a channel for divine messages. In Genesis, Jacob dreams of a ladder joining earth and heaven, and his son Joseph interprets Pharaoh's dreams: seven fat cows swallowed by seven thin ones, which he reads as seven years of plenty followed by seven of famine. In the Book of Daniel, the prophet explains Nebuchadnezzar's dream of a statue made of metals standing on feet of clay. In the Gospel of Matthew, another Joseph receives warnings in dreams about Mary and the child.

Jewish tradition kept thinking about dreams. In the Talmud, the tractate Berakhot devotes several pages to them, and it's the source of a much-quoted line: a dream that isn't interpreted is like a letter that isn't read.

The Islamic tradition: three kinds of dreams

Dreams hold an important place in Islam. A saying attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, preserved in the collections of Bukhari and Muslim, describes three kinds: the good vision that comes from God (ru'ya), the disturbing dream attributed to Satan (hulm), and the dream that grows out of what a person thinks about during the day. In the tradition, only the first calls for interpretation.

The name most tied to Islamic dream interpretation is Ibn Sirin, a scholar from Basra who died around 728. His reputation as an interpreter was enormous, though scholars doubt he wrote the dream book that circulates under his name today, since it mentions people who lived long after his death.

Mesoamerica: dreams among the Nahua

Dreams mattered in ancient Mexico too, though almost everything we know comes through sources written after the Spanish conquest. In Nahuatl, "temictli" means dream, and Friar Alonso de Molina's 1571 dictionary records the expression "temic iximati": to understand or interpret dreams. That there was a word for the craft says a lot.

Friar Bernardino de Sahagún's notes list "the omens and the dreams" together among the things people watched for. And in 1634, a confession manual by Bartolomé de Alva asked the faithful whether they believed in dreams, alongside peyote and ololiuhqui. That friars were still trying to stamp it out shows this way of reading dreams was alive a century later.

Freud and Jung: dreams and the unconscious

In late 1899, Sigmund Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams, with 1900 printed on the title page. For Freud, dreams were the "royal road" to the unconscious: behind what we remember, the manifest content, lay a latent content, usually a disguised wish. His method was to free-associate from each detail.

Carl Jung, who worked with Freud until their split around 1913, offered another view. For Jung, dreams don't so much hide as show: they often compensate for what conscious life neglects, and sometimes they draw on images shared by all of humanity, which he called archetypes. Many symbolic readings today, including much of this site, owe something to that tradition.

Modern dream science

In 1953, Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Kleitman at the University of Chicago described periods of rapid eye movement during sleep, the REM stage, when dreams tend to be most vivid. From then on, dreams could be studied in the lab.

In 1966, Calvin Hall and Robert Van de Castle created a system for coding the content of thousands of dream reports. In 1977, J. Allan Hobson and Robert McCarley proposed that dreams arise from brainstem activity that the cortex tries to make sense of. Later proposals see dreams as continuous with waking concerns, as a rehearsal for threats, or as a way of processing emotion. No single theory explains everything, and the debate is still open.

What you can take from this history for your own dreams

Each era left something useful. From the ancient dream books, the habit of writing dreams down. From Artemidorus, the idea that meaning depends on your life, not on a fixed chart. From Freud and Jung, the value of asking what you felt and what each image reminds you of. And from science, some caution: a dream doesn't predict the future or diagnose anything.

To put it into practice, write your dream down when you wake, underline the main feeling, and ask yourself which part of your life it resembles. Then, if it helps, look things up in the dictionary the way you'd ask for a second opinion, not a verdict.

Frequently asked questions

What is the oldest dream book?

One of the oldest that survives is the Egyptian Chester Beatty III papyrus, dated to around 1220 BCE, though its text seems to be copied from an older one. Mesopotamia had similar handbooks, known from copies in Ashurbanipal's library.

Who was Artemidorus, and why does he matter?

He was a Greek writer of the second century CE who wrote the Oneirocritica, the oldest complete Greek treatise on dreams. He argued that a dream should be read in light of the dreamer's own life, an idea that still holds.

Did Freud think every dream was a wish?

In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud argued that dreams are disguised wish fulfillments. Later he acknowledged cases that were hard to fit, such as repetitive dreams after trauma. Few researchers today accept his theory as it stands.

What does science say about interpreting dreams today?

There's no single theory. Many studies show that dreams reflect waking concerns and emotions, so reflecting on them can help you understand yourself. What science doesn't support is the idea that they foretell the future.

The history of dream interpretation: from Mesopotamia to modern science