The Oneirocritica

The Oneirocritica, in five books, is organized around a central interpretive principle that remains influential in dream analysis discussion today: a dream's meaning depends on the dreamer's own specific circumstances, not on a single fixed symbol table applied uniformly to everyone, so the same dream image can mean different things to a rich man and a poor one, a married woman and an unmarried one. Books one and two present Artemidorus's systematic catalog of dream images and their situational meanings; book three adds supplementary material; books four and five, addressed directly to his son, are more reflective, discussing method and presenting case examples.

The work is the only complete dream interpretation manual to survive intact from classical antiquity, making it an exceptionally important primary source for how dreams were actually read as religious and predictive phenomena in the Greco-Roman world, distinct from and considerably more systematic than the briefer dream passages surviving in other ancient literature. Its influence continued well beyond antiquity, cited by writers into the early modern period and still referenced in modern historical and psychoanalytic discussion of ancient dream theory, including by Sigmund Freud.