This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Celestial Bodies gathers the atlas's two sky symbols, the moon and the sun, and both carry the same interpretive history running along the same two tracks.
Artemidorus devotes part of the second book of his Oneirocritica to the sun, the moon and the stars together, and his reading is consistently social rather than emotional: each is a figure standing for a specific person in the dreamer's life or for the fortune of public affairs, judged by whether it rises, sets or is obscured, with an eclipse read as harm to whoever or whatever the body stands for. Freud's account of dream symbolism runs the same way from a different direction, assigning celestial and royal figures generally to the dreamer's parents rather than to inward states.
The psychological reading that now dominates popular dream dictionaries is Jung's, and it is a genuinely different claim rather than a restatement of the older one. Jung associated the moon with the feminine and with the unconscious, and wrote of the sun, particularly in his alchemical studies, as an image of consciousness and of the solar principle at work in individuation. The familiar modern pairing of the sun with clarity and vitality and the moon with intuition and hidden emotion compresses this Jungian material together with older astrological symbolism inherited from the Renaissance and Romanticism, and it postdates both Artemidorus and the Talmud by many centuries. The two bodies are grouped here because every tradition that has read one has read the other the same way.