Traditions
Dream interpretation traditions
Three of the largest bodies of dream interpretation there are, described as traditions rather than adopted: what each one says, where it says it, and what it required of anybody using it.
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. Every tradition here is considerably more careful than that, and saying so is the most useful thing this section does.
Two of the three are religious traditions somebody may belong to. The Greek material is not: it is here because it is the ancestor. The oldest dream manual that survives is Greek, most western dream dictionaries are descended from it, and what they lost on the way is the part that made it careful.
Why only 4, 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.