It depends entirely on what you mean by accurate. If you mean "will the thing it says come true?", the answer is no, for every dream dictionary ever printed, including ours. If you mean "does it tell me faithfully what people have believed about this image, and who believed it?", a dream dictionary can be accurate, and a good one should be. The difference between those two questions is the whole subject of this page.

Accurate about the future: no

Dreams do not predict events. That is this site's position everywhere, and the argument, including why some dreams seem to come true, is set out in full in do dreams predict the future?. In short: dreams are made from what you already know, feel and half-sense, and memory keeps the rare hits while the thousands of misses vanish.

So any dictionary entry phrased as a forecast, "this dream means money is coming", "a sign of illness in the family", cannot be accurate in that sense, however old or confident it is. That includes most of the classic dream books. Many were written to be read exactly that way. The full title of one of the books we draw on is The Golden Wheel Dream-Book and Fortune-Teller (1862). Gustavus Miller's Ten Thousand Dreams Interpreted (1901) is full of verdicts; of an ordinary dream of teeth he wrote that it "augurs an unpleasant contact with sickness". We report such lines as what Miller said, as history, never as what will happen to you.

The test the old books fail on their own terms

Even if you set prediction aside, the old books do not agree with each other. Take one small scene, a tooth falling into your hand, as our teeth entry records it. Artemidorus, the second-century author of the Oneirocritica, read it as separation from one's children. The Golden Wheel Dream-Book read it as "a good lump of money". Same image, opposite directions.

If dream meanings were facts about the world, that could not happen. It happens constantly because each book is an interpretation, made within one culture and one century, with its own fears and hopes built in. Artemidorus himself knew this: he often made a reading depend on who the dreamer was, so that the same dream meant one thing for a rich man and another for a poor one. The tradition was always a reading, not a measurement.

Our guide to the history of dream interpretation traces how these systems grew and why they mattered to the people who used them.

Accurate about the tradition: yes, if it shows its sources

There is a kind of accuracy a dream dictionary can achieve, and it is worth asking for. A dictionary is accurate in this sense when:

  • Every reading has a named source. Not "a snake means betrayal", but "Miller's 1901 dictionary read the snake as a foreboding of evil". You can then look the book up and check.
  • Disagreement is shown, not smoothed over. If two books read the same image in opposite ways, both appear, with their names.
  • The old readings and the modern ones are kept apart. A Victorian omen and a psychologist's observation are different kinds of statement and should not be blended into one confident line.
  • Nothing is invented. If the old books have no entry for an image, the dictionary says so, rather than making up an ancient-sounding meaning. Our ex-partner page is an example: none of the three books we cite has an entry for a former partner, and the page says exactly that.

Most dream dictionaries online fail the first test. They give one meaning per symbol, in a confident voice, with no source at all. There is no way to tell whether a meaning comes from a 2nd-century Greek, a 19th-century fortune-teller's handbook or the writer's own imagination.

How this site's dictionary is built

Every symbol page here follows the same pattern. First, what named old dream books said, attributed in the same sentence: for the English pages, Artemidorus's Oneirocritica in Friedrich Krauss's 1881 translation, the Golden Wheel Dream-Book (1862) and Miller's 1901 dictionary, all in the public domain so you can read them yourself. Then what psychologists notice about the image, offered as an observation, not a diagnosis. Then one question for you. The editions in other languages are written from that culture's own dream books, not translated, so the same symbol can carry a different reading in another language. That difference is part of the content.

The tools work from the same pages. The dream symbol finder matches the words of your dream against the dictionary in your browser, sends nothing anywhere, and links each symbol it finds to its full entry with a one-line note on what the books said. It does not interpret. Our guide on how to look up a dream symbol walks through using it.

So what is a dream dictionary good for?

Three things, honestly.

  1. Heritage. The old books are a record of how people lived with their dreams for two thousand years. That is worth knowing for its own sake.
  2. A prompt. A reading you disagree with can be as useful as one that fits. Noticing why a reading lands or jars often tells you what the dream was about.
  3. A vocabulary. Knowing that water was read by its state, or teeth by the household, gives you questions to ask of your own dream: what state was the water in, who in my life is on my mind?

What a dictionary cannot do is know your life. The most accurate reading of your dream will always come from setting the image beside your own week, and that last step belongs to you.