Dreams and Their Meanings: How People Read the Night, for Sleep

A long history of dream interpretation for sleep, from the oldest surviving dream book to the modern sleep laboratory. It begins in the British Museum with Papyrus Chester Beatty III, a dream key copied around 1220 BC and kept by the scribe Qenherkhepeshef at Deir el-Medina, the village of the royal tomb-builders. One of its lines calls a dream of your own death good news. From there the story follows who had the right to say what a dream meant: Gudea of Lagash and the Dream Stele of Thutmose IV; the Zaqiqu dream tablets from Ashurbanipal's library at Nineveh, and the ritual of telling a bad dream to a lump of clay; Joseph and Daniel; Penelope's gates of horn and ivory; the sleeping hall of Asclepius at Epidaurus; Aristotle and Cicero on dreams and chance; Artemidorus and his Oneirocritica; Macrobius, Synesius and the Talmud; Ibn Sirin, Ibn Khaldun and the Arabic dream manuals; the medieval Dreambook of Daniel; Mother Bunch's Saint Agnes charm and Aunt Sally's policy dream book. The modern half covers Maury, Hervey de Saint-Denys and Mary Whiton Calkins; Freud's Interpretation of Dreams and Jung; the discovery of REM sleep in Chicago in 1953; the argument over meaning between Hobson and Solms; what dream surveys show about teeth, falling and flying; imagery rehearsal for nightmares; signals sent from inside a lucid dream; and what dreaming may be for. Tell me in the comments where you are listening from tonight. #HistoryForSleep #SleepHistory #Dreams