Conceptions of Dreaming from Homer to 1800

Conceptions of Dreaming from Homer to 1800 is an intellectual history of conceptions of dreaming during the period of the “admonitory dream’ (Homer through the eighteenth century) with an epilogue on the two most important dream theorists at the turn of the twentieth century, Sigmund Freud and Sante De Sanctis. The admonitory dream is thought to predict the future accurately and supernaturally, reveal things unknown in the present or warn the dreamer to do or not to do something. Today it probably remains the most popular conception of the dream worldwide, but since the end of the eighteenth century scholarly and scientific study has become more interested in what dreams are and how they work rather than in which dreams reveal the future, how and their interpretation. Conceptions of Dreaming from Homer to 1800 traces the history of the admonitory dream and alternative conceptions of dreaming, especially Aristotle’s and the Aristotelian traditions.