Also called oneiromancy, dream reading, dream book
Recording your dreams and reading their images for meaning, a practice with written dream books going back more than three thousand years. Modern readers usually treat dreams as messages from their own minds rather than forecasts.
Tonight's moon is read when the page loads.
Take care: If dreams are frequent nightmares tied to trauma, or sleep problems affect daily life, talk with a doctor or therapist. Mugwort is not safe to drink in pregnancy.
A papyrus from the workmen's village of Deir el-Medina lists dreams one per line, each marked good or bad with a short meaning. Many readings work by wordplay or by opposites. It later belonged to the scribe Qenherkhepshef, and its language suggests a text first compiled centuries earlier.
Chinese dream books are credited to the Duke of Zhou, honored as a patron of dreams, though the books themselves were compiled much later. They sort hundreds of dream images by theme, such as animals, buildings and weather, and remain widely consulted today.
Freud rejected fixed dream-book meanings and asked dreamers to free-associate from each image to their own memories and wishes. His approach, and Carl Jung's later work on symbols, turned dream reading inward, toward the dreamer's own life rather than future events.
The oldest surviving dream book is Papyrus Chester Beatty III, copied around 1220 BC at Deir el-Medina in Egypt and now in the British Museum. It lists dream images with good or bad readings. In the second century AD Artemidorus of Daldis wrote the Oneirocritica, five books built on years of collecting dreams and their outcomes. He insisted an interpreter must know the dreamer's occupation, health, status and age, because the same image means different things for different people.
Artemidorus was translated into Arabic by Hunayn ibn Ishaq in 877, and Islamic dream interpretation also drew on works credited to Ibn Sirin. In China, dream books were credited to the Duke of Zhou. Printed dream dictionaries became bestsellers in Europe and America, and in 1899 Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams moved the focus to the dreamer's own mind. Sleep science finds dreams often reflect waking concerns and emotions, but there is no good evidence that they foretell events.
On the night of 20 January, a person goes to bed without supper after a small rite with pins and a prayer, hoping to see a future sweetheart in a dream.
In Japanese folklore the baku is a chimera that eats bad dreams. People called on it after nightmares and slept with its picture or name under the pillow.
The ancient practice of sleeping in a sacred place to receive a guiding or healing dream, made famous at the sanctuaries of Asclepius such as Epidaurus. Given here as a modern dream-question practice; it is not medical care.
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