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Dreamers recorded by Artemidorus2nd century CE

Artemidorus' casebook of dreams

The oldest surviving collection of real people's dreams, each paired with what the dreamer believed happened next.

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The dream

Retold in our own words from the sources below, not quoted.

Artemidorus of Daldis wrote the Oneirocritica, a manual of dream interpretation in five books. The fifth is different from the rest: instead of rules, it is a list of short case reports. Each one gives a dream and then the event that followed it, as reported to him.

He says he collected dreams by travelling through Greece, Asia Minor and Italy and by listening to many people, including the professional diviners of the marketplace whom others looked down on.

Where the story comes from

Artemidorus lived in the Roman empire in the second century. His work is the only complete ancient dream book to survive, and it is read today by historians of everyday life, because the dreams mention slaves, athletes, sailors, family quarrels and money worries.

Book V was meant as evidence that his method worked. Because only dreams that seemed to come true were likely to be remembered and passed on, the collection shows how people understood dreams, not that dreams predict events.

How it has been read

Classic texts

Artemidorus insisted that the same image means different things for different dreamers: their work, age, health and circumstances all mattered. That attention to the individual dreamer is the part of his method that still feels modern.

History

A casebook of dreams that came true has a built-in bias: dreams that were followed by nothing notable were forgotten. We read Book V as a record of people's hopes and fears in the second century, and we do not use it to predict anything.

Questions for your own dreams

  1. Which details of your own life would someone need to know to understand your dream?
  2. Do you remember dreams more when something happens afterwards?
  3. If you kept a casebook of your dreams for a month, what patterns might appear?

Symbols in this dream

Had a dream that stayed with you?

Tell us your dream

Sources

Every reading on this page comes from these works. Page references have not all been checked yet; those still waiting are marked.

  1. Artemidorus of Daldis (1644). The Interpretation of Dreams (Oneirocritica), in five books, translated by Robert Wood. London.

    first published 2nd century CE

    public domain

    • Cited at: Book V (reference not yet checked)
    • Cited at: Book I, introduction; Book V (reference not yet checked)

    Greek dream manual from the Roman era. We paraphrase the public-domain Wood translation (1644). Modern translations (White 1975, Harris-McCoy 2012, Hammond 2020) are copyrighted and only cited.