How the world has read dreams

Every culture that wrote left dream interpretation behind: omen tablets, temple rites, legal dialogues, alphabetical manuals, midwinter guessing feasts. These pages report eight traditions as history, quoting the primary texts verbatim from public-domain translations, and asserting none of their meanings as true. The dreams themselves, 122,762 of them, are on the atlas; the most common themes are counted at common dreams.

The Assyrian Dream Book

Nineveh, 7th century BCE

The oldest surviving dream manuals are omen lists.

Greek Dream Interpretation

The Greek world, 8th century BCE to 5th century CE

Homer gave Greek dreaming its founding image, the two gates: deceptive dreams come through a gate of ivory and true ones through a gate of horn (Odyssey 19).

Dream Interpretation in the Talmud

Babylonia, compiled c. 500 CE

The ninth chapter of tractate Berakot is a complete dream book embedded in the Talmud: page after page of symbols and their meanings, wells and rivers, wine and mountains, oxen and geese, alongside stories that quietly undermine the whole enterprise.

Dream Interpretation in the Chinese Classics

China, c. 1000 BCE onward

The Rites of Zhou, the idealized blueprint of the early Chinese state, includes a court office for dream interpretation: an official who classifies the six kinds of dreams and reads them against the stars and seasons.