A Method, Not a Dictionary

Artemidorus organizes the Oneirocritica across five books, moving from a foundational distinction, between dreams that simply express a present anxiety or desire and dreams he considers genuinely predictive of future events, into an extensive catalog of specific dream images and their possible meanings. What sets his approach apart from the simpler dream-symbol lists also circulating in the ancient world is his insistence that no image carries one fixed meaning on its own: the same dream, he argues repeatedly, means something different for a rich man than for a poor one, for a married woman than for an unmarried one, for a sailor than for a farmer, because the interpretation depends on how the image would plausibly connect to that specific dreamer's actual circumstances and concerns.

Artemidorus presents this method as something he built empirically rather than invented from theory, claiming to have traveled extensively through Greece, Asia Minor and Italy interviewing professional dream diviners and collecting their accumulated case knowledge rather than relying only on his own judgment or on earlier written dream books, several of which he names and criticizes for their oversimplified, one-size-fits-all approach to symbol meaning. That claimed empirical grounding, whatever its actual reliability, gives the text a case-study quality unusual among surviving divination manuals, closer to an accumulated professional casebook than to a philosophical treatise on the nature of dreams.