A Short History of Dream Interpretation in the West and Islam
From temples to dream books
The ancient Mediterranean took dreams seriously as divine mail: Egyptians and Greeks slept in temples hoping for healing dreams, and in the second century Artemidorus compiled the Oneirocritica, a five-volume manual whose method — interpret the symbol in light of the dreamer's life — still sounds modern. Medieval and early-modern Europe folded dreams into folk almanacs and household dream books, the ancestors of today's dream dictionaries.
The Islamic tradition
Dream interpretation holds an unusually dignified place in Islam. True dreams are counted among the blessings of prophecy's legacy, and a rich scholarly literature — traditionally associated with Ibn Sirin in the eighth century — set rules that remain influential: weigh the dreamer's circumstances, distinguish dreams of divine, psychological and mundane origin, and interpret with restraint. To this day, dream interpretation remains a living practice across the Muslim world.
Toward psychology
Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) turned dreams from omens into evidence about the dreamer, and Jung widened the lens with shared archetypes. Modern psychology inherits their central move: the dream speaks about you, not about fate. This dictionary's western folk and Islamic lenses preserve the older voices alongside that psychological reading.