Few dream images split the world's dream books as cleanly as the snake. Open an American dictionary from 1901 and the snake is evil in every form. Open a Japanese dream book from 1908 and it is a good marriage. Open the Chinese Book of Songs and it is a baby girl on the way. The dreamers were frightened of the same animal. The books simply had different jobs, different ancestors and different readers.
Here is what nine traditions said about the snake, each line taken from a named book. You can see the same comparison laid out card by card in the One dream, nine cultures tool.
The snake at a glance
| Tradition | Book | What it read in the snake |
|---|---|---|
| English | Miller, 1901 | evil in all its forms, unless the dreamer overcomes the snake |
| German | Artemidorus (Krauss, 1881) | a creeping illness and an enemy |
| Polish | the old sennik, before 1900 | human malice, or a woman's betrayal |
| Islamic (tabir) | Nablusi | an enemy who hides his hostility; black snakes the most cunning |
| Neapolitan | Rumeo, 1866 | number 89, with no omen attached |
| Chinese | Book of Songs | the omen of a daughter |
| Japanese | 夢判斷實驗書, 1908 | a beautiful wife for a man, a good husband for a woman |
| Peruvian | Valdizán and Maldonado, 1922 | money in Lima, infidelity in Cuzco |
| Portuguese | Serrano, Porto 1883 | seduction close at hand |
Europe: the snake as an enemy
The longest line of descent runs from Artemidorus, the Greek writer of the 2nd century whose manual of dream interpretation survives whole. In Friedrich Krauss's German translation of 1881 he reads the snake as a creeping illness and an enemy, and he gives a rule of correspondence: whatever the snake did to the dreamer in the dream, the illness or the enemy would do in the same way. The scene decided the reading.
The folk dream books kept the enemy and dropped the method. Gustavus Miller's Ten Thousand Dreams Interpreted (1901) opens its snake entry by calling the dream a warning of evil in all its forms, and nearly every branch that follows is about enemies, sickness or deceit, unless the dreamer overcomes the snake. The Golden Wheel Dream-Book of 1862 reads snakes as an enemy or a slanderer. Lebrecht's German Egyptian dream book of 1870 gives the plain sight of a snake one line: be on your guard.
Artemidorus himself broke ranks on one point. Because of their strong venom, he tied adders and vipers to money and so to rich women, and wrote that in his own observation their bite, their attack and their coiling all meant good. The later books, which read a bite as enemies doing harm, never followed him there.
The Polish sennik: malice, and a victory
The Polish senniki are terse. The old pre-1900 sennik gives the snake its classic line, human malice or a woman's betrayal, set beside the image with nothing but a colon between them. The Warsaw sennik of 1914 keeps the betrayal, the interwar Najnowszy sennik egipski of 1937 keeps both halves, and Góralczyk's sennik of 1875 reads the snake as a cunning enemy. All of the dictionary senniki agree on one happier scene: killing a snake is victory over one's enemies.
The tabir tradition: an enemy graded by colour
The classical Islamic books also read the snake as an enemy, but they grade it with care. ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī, in his Taʿṭīr al-anām, describes the snake as an enemy, often a powerful one who hides his hostility, and calls the black snakes the most cunning and venomous. The Muntakhab al-kalām, attributed to Ibn Sirin, measures each enemy by the snake's harm, size and thickness.
The two books then disagree in plain sight. Nablusi calls white snakes weak and feeble enemies. The Muntakhab calls the white ones the hardest enemies to deal with. A reader who wants one answer will not get it from the classical tabir books, and that is part of what makes them worth reading.
The Neapolitan smorfia: a number, not a verdict
In Naples, the dream book's main job was to turn images into the numbers 1 to 90 of the lotto. Giuseppe Rumeo's Nuova Smorfia (Naples, 1866) gives any snake the number 89, the same number it gives to Death in person, and it gives the cervone, the large harmless snake of southern Italy, number 64. The number list attaches no omen to the snake. For a reading, Italian readers had Artemidorus in Pietro Lauro's translation of 1547, which repeats the old enemy and illness. The numbers are folk heritage, and the smorfia page treats them that way.
China: a daughter, a belt, and great wealth
The oldest Chinese verdict on the snake is a happy one. In the ode Sigan of the Book of Songs, a diviner reads the dreams of a household: bears are the omen of sons, and small and large snakes are the omen of a daughter.
The Liezi takes a different route and explains the dream by the sleeper's body: whoever sleeps lying on a belt dreams of a snake, just as a bird carrying off a hair brings a dream of flying. There is no good or bad in it, only a cause.
The Zhou Gong dream list, the popular dream book printed in the 1880 Yuxiaji, reads a snake biting a person as great wealth coming, one of its many inversions in which a frightening scene gets a lucky reading. Chen Shiyuan, collecting dream anecdotes in 1562, was already sceptical of the Book of Songs: must snakes always mean a daughter, he asked.
Japan: a marriage and a treasure
Karasawa Shōkaku's 夢判斷實驗書 (Tokyo, 1908) opens its snake entries with marriage: a man who sees a snake gains a beautiful wife, and a woman gains a good husband. Stepping on a snake means coming into treasure, and being bitten means a great profit. The book shows no trace of the enemy reading that dominates the European dictionaries. Many of its entries follow the Chinese Zhou Gong list closely, and its snake is far closer to Chinese luck than to Western menace.
The Spanish-speaking world: one image, two cities
Folklorists recording beliefs in Latin America found the snake reading changing from one town to the next. In the table published by Hermilio Valdizán and Ángel Maldonado in 1922, dreaming of toads or snakes meant money in Lima and conjugal infidelity in Cuzco. In Santiago de Chile, Julio Vicuña Cifuentes recorded in 1915 that a snake dream announced a misfortune, and in Andalusia, Alejandro Guichot y Sierra noted in 1883 that a very large snake meant rain. In Porto, Bento Serrano's dream book of 1883 read the snake as seduction close at hand.
What psychologists add
The traditions read the snake from the outside, as a sign. The psychological reading turns it round. Freud read snakes through drive and desire, Jung through transformation, the animal that sheds its skin. The common modern view is that a dream snake often stands for something in waking life that feels both fascinating and unsafe, a person or a change the dreamer is circling without facing. Our snake symbol page sets the variants out in full, from black snakes to snake bites.
Reading the disagreement
If you dreamed of a snake, the books above cannot all be right about you, and none of them is meant to be. What they show is how much a culture brings to an image. The European books inherited Artemidorus' enemy. The Japanese books borrowed Chinese luck. The Neapolitan book needed a number. The disagreement is the useful part: it frees you to ask what the snake meant in your dream.
For the longer story of where these books came from, read our short history of dream interpretation. For why the readings split at all, see why dream meanings differ by culture, and for the books themselves, what a dream-interpretation tradition is.