Long before Freud, Greek poets, physicians and philosophers were asking whether the strange images we see while sleeping might contain another meaning entirely.

Long before Sigmund Freud put dreams on the psychoanalyst’s couch, the ancient Greeks were already trying to figure out what happened to the mind when the body went to sleep.

Was a dream a message from the gods? A warning about the future? A clue that something was wrong inside the body? Or simply the mind rearranging things it had already seen and experienced?

For centuries, some of Greece’s most influential thinkers wrestled with those questions.

A new book from Princeton University Press argues that their fascination with dreams ultimately became something much larger: an early attempt to understand how human beings interpret hidden meaning.

In The Ancient Interpretation of Dreams: Early Greek Hermeneutics and Its Sources, Princeton University classics professor Mirjam E. Kotwick traces Greek thinking about dreams from Homer through Aeschylus, Herodotus, Antiphon, the Hippocratic medical writers, Plato and Aristotle.

What emerges is a world in which dreams could occupy the territory between religion, medicine, philosophy and literature—and in which the act of deciphering them helped Greeks think about something we now take for granted: metaphor.

Penelope and the Twenty Geese

One of the most striking examples comes from The Odyssey.

While Odysseus is finally nearing the end of his long absence, Penelope describes a dream in which 20 geese are feeding at her house. An eagle suddenly swoops down and kills them all.

Then things become even stranger.

The eagle speaks.

It tells Penelope that the dream is not merely a dream. The geese represent the suitors who have occupied her home and competed for her hand, while the eagle represents Odysseus, returning to destroy them.

For a modern reader, the mechanism feels surprisingly familiar. One image stands for something else. The dream has a surface story, but its real meaning must be uncovered.

Kotwick calls this a “hermeneutics of similarity.”

The interpreter looks beyond what literally happened in the dream and searches for relationships—similarities, associations and correspondences—that might reveal what the dream actually signifies.

That matters because the Greeks were doing more than compiling a dictionary in which an eagle always meant one thing and water always meant another.

They were asking how one thing could represent another thing.

That is remarkably close to the intellectual work involved in understanding metaphor.

When we call someone a rock, for example, nobody imagines that the person has suddenly become a piece of stone. We recognize a similarity—strength, stability, reliability—and understand the intended meaning.

Ancient Greek thinkers were confronting versions of that same problem while attempting to make sense of dreams.

Were the Gods Speaking?

There was no single Greek theory explaining where dreams came from.

In literature and religious thought, dreams could arrive from outside the dreamer and carry divine information. Gods could send warnings, instructions or visions of what was to come.

But Greek thinkers also began looking inside the human body.

The Hippocratic medical tradition provides a fascinating example.

In the work known as On Regimen, dreams could be considered evidence about a person’s physical condition. During sleep, when the distractions of waking life diminished, images appearing in dreams might reveal disturbances inside the body before those disturbances became otherwise obvious.

The concept sounds strange by modern medical standards, but the intellectual leap behind it is significant.

The dream did not necessarily have to come from Olympus.

It might come from you.

A physician therefore had reason to pay attention.

Dream interpretation was beginning to move from divination toward observation of the body—even though religious and medical explanations could continue to coexist.

Aristotle Wasn’t Ready to Dismiss Dreams Either

Aristotle approached the subject with characteristic skepticism.

In his On Divination in Sleep, he considered whether apparently prophetic dreams should be believed at all.

He was unwilling simply to accept that the gods were sending messages into people’s bedrooms. But neither did he consider the entire phenomenon beneath serious investigation.

Aristotle tried instead to understand dreams as part of the natural world.

Dream images, in his account, could grow from impressions and sensations that remain within us, becoming changed or distorted while we sleep.

And when it came to interpretation, resemblance mattered.

The skilled dream interpreter, Aristotle suggested, was someone capable of recognizing similarities within images that had become distorted—rather like identifying a reflection on moving water.

Again the important idea isn’t whether Aristotle could successfully explain dreams according to modern neuroscience.

It is that he believed there was an intellectual problem worth solving.

Dreams were strange. But strange did not necessarily mean meaningless.

An Ancient Greek Search for Hidden Meaning

This is where Kotwick’s study takes dream interpretation beyond fortune telling.

The Greeks encountered the same fundamental problem every time they confronted a dream:

What if what we see is not what it means?

Once that possibility exists, interpretation becomes necessary.

The eagle may be Odysseus.

The geese may be the suitors.

An image produced by a sleeping mind may signify something happening inside the body.

A seemingly simple story may contain another story beneath it.

And that habit of looking below the surface did not remain confined to bedrooms.

Kotwick connects Greek thinking about dreams with the development of approaches to poetry, language, allegory, medicine, philosophy and literary interpretation.

The Greeks were effectively experimenting with the idea that meaning could be indirect—that something could communicate through resemblance rather than by saying exactly what it meant.

That is a surprisingly modern idea emerging from one of humanity’s oldest experiences.

Because thousands of years later, we still wake up from certain dreams and do exactly what Penelope did.

We wonder why that person appeared.

Why that place?

Why an animal we haven’t thought about in years?

Why something frightening, ridiculous or impossibly beautiful suddenly seemed completely logical while we were asleep?

Science has transformed what we know about the sleeping brain. But the instinct that fascinated the ancient Greeks hasn’t disappeared.

Sometimes a dream feels like nonsense.

And sometimes, almost immediately after opening our eyes, we find ourselves asking the same ancient question:

What did that mean?

The Ancient Interpretation of Dreams: Early Greek Hermeneutics and Its Sources by Mirjam E. Kotwick is available through The Pappas Post Bookshop.