Oneirocritica (The Interpretation of Dreams)

The Oneirocritica is a primary Greek dream manual in five books, conventionally dated to the second century CE, and this record states an honest limit: no precise year of composition is established, so the publication year is left unset rather than guessed at. As a primary text it is authoritative for what Artemidorus himself records as the dream interpretive method and symbolism of his period, checkable against the translation, not for whether his interpretive claims about a given dream symbol are accurate or universally held across the ancient Mediterranean world, which the text's own single-author perspective cannot establish. Use it to establish what this specific ancient dream manual states about a symbol or method; a claim about the empirical prevalence of a dream theme needs a separate modern empirical source such as Hall and Van de Castle's coding system.