Systems and Book About Dreams from the Modern World

A well developed systematization of dream interpretation apparently existed in China, but was never taken entirely seriously, or at least - being incorporated into the civil service - lacked the glamour of antiquity or divine revelation. Joseph Needham's only indexed reference to dreaming in ancient China is tantalizingly brief: Oneiromancy, or prognostication by dreams, was also practiced in China, as in most ancient civilizations, though it can hardly be said to have taken a very important place there. The Chou Li says that the interpretation of dreams was in the department of the Grand Augur (Ta Pu), and mentions a special expert of lower grade (Chan Meng) who specialized in it. Here again the chief book was late, the Meng Chan I Chih of Chhen Shih-Yuan, published in +1562 (Ming). How far certain aspects of Chinese dream-interpretation might be considered, as Chinese themselves are sometimes inclined to think, anticipations of Freudian psychology, would be a subject worth investigating. (Needham, 1956)

The invention of printing in Europe in the fifteenth century soon enabled the publication of a number of books offering dream interpretations for ordinary people. These books typically claimed to be the distillation of wisdom handed down from Arab sages through the centuries, and they all drew heavily on Artemidorus's work. They took the form of dictionaries, with lists of subject matter and their associated meanings. As Raymond de Becker (1968) points out, they could have been treated as gospel by the naive, or turned into parlor games by skeptics. The Palais du Prince du Sotnmeil, written by Celestin de Mirbel in 1667, actually states in the preface that 'The favors of the strictest ladies will be wholly won for you, at the moment when you become the sympathetic interpreter of their dreams' - certainly a pragmatic reason for buying this dream book.

The modern newspaper horoscope has largely taken over from dream books, although the latter are still published and still draw largely on the works of Artimedorus (or claim to). The truth is, few people believe that revelations are going to be made to them in dreams - and even on the rare occasions when an individual really feels that a dream is of overwhelming significance, the so-called dream books only take in the most gullible. Nevertheless, we still tell each other our dreams and look them up in these absurd books, and still read our horoscopes - just for fun.