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 dened 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. e 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 signies 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 aicted with the disease of tuberculosis”).2 eoretical

1 e bibliography is extensive. Two recent discussions in English with relevant scholarship are Jovan Bilbija, “Ancient Dream-Books as Mirrors of Worlds,” in E. Cingano and L. Milano (eds), Papers on Ancient Literatures: Greece, Rome and the Near East: Proceedings of the “Advanced Seminar in the Humanities,” Venice International University 2004-2005 (Venice, 2008), pp. 75-104; and S.M. Oberhelman, “Prolegomena to the Reconstruction of the Archetype of the Greek Somniale Danielis,” Quaderni di Studi Indo-Mediterranei, 2 (2009): pp. 107-24. All translations in this chapter are my own, unless otherwise noted.