ABSTRACT
For nearly four millennia, people have resorted to dream-key manuals to discover information about the present and the future. 1 A dream-key manual may be defined as a compendium of dreams or dream symbols that are interpreted for the purpose of providing a guide to present or future matters like health and illness, wealth and poverty, life and death, success and failure, and marriage and divorce. The barest (and most typical) schematic form of such manuals is the arrangement, usually alphabetically or by thematic grouping, of dream symbols that are assigned a predictive value stated either as a simple equivalence (“Eating roasted rabbit signifies disease but also wealth from a woman” or “Drinking olive oil: illness”) or in a protasis-apodosis construction (“If someone dreams of eating hot pita bread, he will be afflicted with the disease of tuberculosis”). 2 Theoretical discussions are rarely offered; only a few writers of dream-key manuals discuss the psychology of dreaming, attempt an analysis of dreamers, or divulge their methods of interpreting dreams. 3 Typically, dreams are drawn up in repetitive and often banal lists and are whittled down to a simple verbal action or a noun qualified by an adjective or two, with the entries often alphabetized for easy reference by the reader. Each symbol is then assigned an associative meaning, along the pattern of “if x then y” or “x = y.” It is an open question whether any of the dreams preserved in these texts are historical, that is, whether people did in fact have the dreams that are recorded—although many ancient writers claimed this was the case. 4 Even if the dreams did come from real dreamers, they have been stripped of their individual specificity and recast in universal terms. Thus, a dream of eating lion meat means one thing and one thing only: a lawsuit with one’s enemy. Whether the dreamer is a man or a woman, a king or a slave does not affect the predicted outcome (a lawsuit); nor are any details about the lawsuit given—what the suit may involve, the adversary’s identity, the result, etc. The dreamer simply has been informed by the text he reads that a lawsuit will occur and that his opponent will be some personal enemy. 5
