Greek tradition
Money in Greek dream interpretation
There is no Greek reading of money in a dream, and saying why is more useful than inventing one.
What this page is
What follows describes what the Greek material says about particular images, where it says it, and what the method around it required. It is not a claim that a dream about any of these things means anything, and Artemidorus's own framework holds that most dreams mean nothing at all.
Artemidorus gives the case that demolishes the whole idea of a fixed reading. To dream you are made of silver or gold, he says, means one thing if you are a slave, in which case you will be sold, another if you are poor, in which case you will become rich, and another again if you are already rich, in which case you become worth plotting against.
One image, three readings, and the variable is not the dream at all. It is the dreamer. He instructs his son to establish the man's circumstances before venturing anything, and treats an interpreter who skips that step as simply not doing the job.
This is the part of the method that every descendant of the book discarded, because it is the part that cannot be printed as a list. A dictionary entry has to be the same for everyone who reads it, and the founding text of the genre says that is the one thing an interpretation cannot be.
Worth knowing
Included precisely because it is not a symbol reading. Any page offering you the ancient Greek meaning of money in dreams has invented it.
What is actually recorded about dreaming of money
Money dreams are extremely common and track waking financial concern more reliably than they track anything symbolic. Finding it and losing it are reported about equally, and both usually arrive during periods when money is already on the dreamer's mind.
The money entrySources and reviewed references
1 reference. What these labels mean
- 1.Oneirocritica (The Interpretation of Dreams)Historical dream record
Artemidorus of Daldis (200)
Cited for: The earliest surviving systematic dream dictionary, and evidence that dream interpretation has been organised by symbol and by the dreamer's circumstances for at least eighteen centuries.