When people say "my grandmother's dream book says…", they are usually quoting a tradition without knowing it. A dream-interpretation tradition is not one book. It is a family of books that a culture keeps copying: the same headwords, the same terse verdicts, passed from edition to edition, trimmed, padded and reprinted for a new market. Each family has its own format, its own favourite images, and its own idea of what a dream is for.
This page introduces the six families behind the non-English cards in our One dream, nine cultures tool, with the books, authors and dates this site actually quotes. The broader story, from Egyptian papyri to Freud, is told in our short history of dream interpretation, so this page stays with the books.
The Neapolitan smorfia (Italy)
The smorfia is a dream book with a sideline that became its main business: it gives each dream image a number from 1 to 90, the numbers of the lotto of Naples. The edition this site quotes is Giuseppe Rumeo's Nuova Smorfia del giuoco del lotto, printed in Naples by Luigi Chiurazzi in 1866. It runs to thousands of headwords, each with a number, and it also prints a short Spiegazione dei sogni, a dream dictionary of meanings.
The smorfia is not one fixed text. A single edition can give one thing two numbers: in Rumeo, the earthquake is 89 as terremoto and 33 as tremuoto. A Milan dream book of 1825 gives the serpent a different number from Rumeo's. For meanings, Italian readers also had Artemidorus in Pietro Lauro's translation, printed in Venice in 1547. The numbers are folk heritage, not tips; you can browse all 90 in Rumeo's version on our smorfia napoletana page.
The sennik (Poland)
Sennik is simply the Polish for "dream book", and the genre was so widespread that the word needs no explaining in Poland. This site draws on four senniki: an old Polish sennik printed before 1900; Góralczyk's sennik of 1875, published in Kraków under a pseudonym of the writer Władysław Ludwik Anczyc, whose title also promises a sure way of winning at the lottery; a Warsaw sennik of 1914 advertising some six thousand dreams in alphabetical order, "Egyptian and Arabic" by its own title; and the Najnowszy sennik egipski z planetami of 1937.
The format barely changes across those sixty years: the image, a colon, a verdict. "Snake: human malice, or a woman's betrayal." The "Egyptian" in the titles is a selling point, not a pedigree.
Tabir (the Islamic tradition)
Tabir (Arabic taʿbīr) is the Islamic science of dream interpretation, and it is the one tradition on this list that is living religious scholarship as well as folklore. Its anchor is Muhammad ibn Sirin of Basra, who died in 728. The Muntakhab al-kalām fī tafsīr al-aḥlām circulates under his name, but it quotes authors who lived generations after him, so the attribution is not accepted; it was first printed in Cairo in 1858, in the margin of a larger book. That larger book is the Taʿṭīr al-anām of ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī, who died in 1731, a large alphabetical dream dictionary.
The tradition sorts dreams into three kinds: true dreams, dreams that come from the self, and troubling dreams, which the classical advice says not to retell or dwell on. Its readings are precise about context and often run against European books; gold, fortune in most folk dictionaries, is a disliked thing and a loss of money in Nablusi.
The Zhou Gong dream list (China)
The most famous Chinese dream book is named after Zhou Gong, the Duke of Zhou, a statesman of early antiquity. Confucius, in the Analects, lamented his own decline with the words "for a long time now I have not dreamed of the Duke of Zhou", and the name has belonged to dreaming ever since. The dream list itself is a much later folk compilation. The version quoted here was printed in 1880 in the Yuxiaji, a popular almanac, and runs to twenty-seven sections of seven-character lines, each an image and a verdict: "a snake biting a person: great wealth".
Behind the folk list stand older texts that this site also quotes: the Book of Songs, where snakes in a dream are the omen of a daughter; the Liezi and the medical Lingshu, which explain dreams by the sleeping body; and Chen Shiyuan's 1562 collection of dream anecdotes.
Yume-handan (Japan)
Yume-handan (夢判断), "dream judgement", is the Japanese name for dream divination. The two books this site quotes are both from the Meiji era. Karasawa Shōkaku's 夢判斷實驗書 (Tokyo, 1908) lists its entries by subject, from the heavens and the earth to people, buildings, animals and plants, each in the form "if you see X, it is a sign of Y". Many of its lines follow the Chinese Zhou Gong list closely. A second book, 夢判斷 (1906), is a Japanese translation of the Chinese Menglin xuanjie, with a lucky or unlucky mark on every entry.
Around the books runs a folk layer: the first dream of the New Year, with its famous ranking of Mount Fuji, a hawk and an aubergine, already quoted in a book by Jippensha Ikku of 1809; the belief that dreams go by contraries, recorded by Yanagita Kunio in 1938; and the baku, the creature that eats bad dreams, discussed by Orikuchi Shinobu in 1929. The same word, 夢判断, is also the Japanese title of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, which is a different thing.
The Traumbuch (Germany)
Traumbuch is German for "dream book". The German tradition on this site has two layers. The learned one is Artemidorus of Daldis, the 2nd-century Greek author of the oldest dream manual that survives whole, read in Friedrich S. Krauss's translation Symbolik der Träume (Vienna, 1881). The popular one is the Egyptisches Traumbuch printed in 1870 under the name of the monk Aegydius Lebrecht, an alphabetical folk dictionary of one-line verdicts. The two often disagree: Artemidorus read the bite of a viper as good, and Lebrecht read a snake bite as persecution by wicked people.
What the traditions share
Set side by side, the six families look alike in three ways. They are lists, image then verdict, with little or no reasoning. They borrow authority from a famous or distant name: an Egyptian monk, the Duke of Zhou, Ibn Sirin. And they copy one another, so lines travel: Artemidorus into Italian and German, the Zhou Gong list into Japanese.
They also share a limit. Every one of them read dreams as signs of what was coming, and none of them can tell you what your dream foretells, because no dream foretells anything. Read them as what they are: records of what a culture hoped for and feared.
How this site uses them
Every tradition card in the One dream, nine cultures tool names its book, its edition and where in the book the line stands. To see the traditions disagree on a single image, start with what a snake means in dreams across cultures, then why dream meanings differ by culture. The snake symbol page shows how one entry reads when the traditions and the psychologists are put together.