Greek tradition
Wedding in Greek dream interpretation
Marriage and death are read as versions of each other, and the reason given is about the ceremonies rather than the events.
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 records that for a sick man, dreaming of marrying a young woman portends his death. The stated logic is not grim symbolism but observation: a wedding and a funeral are surrounded by the same things. The gathering, the procession, the clothes, the music, the household turned out. If interpretation is the juxtaposition of similarities, these two are the most similar events a Greek town produced.
He treats the equivalence as running both ways, so that each can signify the other, and he reports a case in which a woman dreamt of marrying a stranger and it was read against her sister's death.
The Islamic manuals arrive somewhere adjacent by a different route, reading a wedding as a binding and often as a burden. Two traditions, two lines of reasoning, and neither of them produces the celebration a modern reader expects.
Worth knowing
The condition is doing the work here, not the image. The reading is given for a man who is already ill, which is exactly the dreamer-dependence the modern genre strips out.
What is actually recorded about dreaming of wedding
Wedding dreams are dominated by things going wrong: the wrong dress, the wrong person, nobody arriving. The commitment is rarely the anxiety; the ceremony is.
The wedding 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.