The dream book is one of the oldest continuously produced genres in this atlas, and its form barely changes: a list of things that may be dreamed, and what each portends.
Egyptian examples survive on papyrus. Mesopotamian omen collections treat dreams alongside other signs. The fullest surviving classical work is the Oneirocritica of Artemidorus, written in the second century AD, and it is more sophisticated than its imitators: Artemidorus insists that the same image means different things for different dreamers, and that the interpreter must know the dreamer's occupation, status and habits before ruling. Islamic dream interpretation developed a large literature of its own, much of it circulating under the name of an early authority, and it is taken seriously as a discipline rather than treated as a diversion.
All of this treats the dream as a message from outside, whether from a god, from the future, or from the state of the world.
The modern turn reversed the direction. From the end of the nineteenth century the dream was read as a message from within, produced by the dreamer's own mind, and the interpreter's job became the recovery of what the dreamer already contained. Freud and Jung disagreed about almost everything else and agreed on that.
The printed dream dictionary sold today is a survival of the older genre inside the newer assumption, offering fixed meanings for symbols while describing them as personal.