Traditions

Religious dream interpretation

Two of the largest dream-interpretation traditions in the world, described as traditions: what they say, where they say it, and what they themselves required of anybody using them.

Read this first

These pages do not tell you what your dream means, and this site does not hold that dreams carry messages. What they describe is what a tradition says, where it says it, and how it came to say it.

That is a narrower claim than the one most sites make in this territory, and it is the only one that can be supported. The usual article assembles a “biblical meaning” by matching a dream image to unrelated verses in which the object happens to appear. Both of the traditions here are considerably more careful than that, and saying so is the most useful thing this section does.

Biblical dream interpretationWhat the biblical texts actually say about dreams, and what they do not7 images coveredIslamic dream interpretation and the Ibn Sirin traditionThe most developed symbol tradition in the subject, and the caveats it built in9 images covered

Why only two, and why only some images

An image gets a page in a tradition only where that tradition genuinely treats it. A dictionary that has an entry for everything is telling you it invented most of them, and the rule against thin near-duplicates applies here more than anywhere else on the site.