The Dream Atlas draws on dream material from twenty-five traditions, from third-millennium BCE cuneiform omen tablets to contemporary dream journals.
This index is provisional throughout. No repository listed here will be processed without the prior involvement of leading specialists in that tradition — scope, selection and method are settled with them first, and the corpus follows digitisation rather than dictating it.
The design principle is representativeness rather than volume: each tradition contributes a subset sufficient for comparison, and no tradition is treated as the analytical centre.
How the corpus is composed
Four distinctions do the work
Dream material is not uniform across traditions, and the corpus does not treat it as though it were. Four distinctions govern how sources are identified, described and compared.
Source type
- DREAM-SPECIFIC
- Material that is dream content in itself — interpretation manuals, dream diaries, omen series, dream-journey texts. Processable with minimal prior curation.
- EMBEDDED
- Dream content held inside far larger non-dream collections — chronicles, epics, hagiographies, diary archives. Requires identification and extraction first.
Genre
What the document is. A Ramesside omen entry and a contemporary dream journal are not two instances of one thing.
- MANUAL
- Interpretation keys and omen lists — statements about dreams rather than records of them.
- REPORT
- An account of a dream someone had.
- NARRATIVE
- A dream episode composed as part of a literary work.
- VISION
- Visionary and instructional texts at the boundary of dreaming.
Transmission
How the document reached us — a separate question from what it is.
- DIRECT
- The dreamer's own words survive, in the original or in translation.
- COMPILED
- Assembled by a later editor from earlier material.
- MEDIATED
- Recorded by a fieldworker, missionary or colonial observer.
Repository
Digital repositories are access layers, not dream corpora. The Chinese Text Project hosts the dynastic histories; the dream episodes within them still have to be found.
Each tradition names the repositories through which its material is reached, kept distinct from the material itself.
A note on the sources
Digitisation is uneven across these traditions: some are fully edited and searchable, others survive in manuscript collections still being catalogued, and the corpus follows that unevenness rather than concealing it. Several dream manuals circulate under names their authors did not carry, and are treated here as the traditions that transmitted them rather than as the work of the figures they invoke. Material from living Indigenous traditions is listed as part of the documentary record; its use is governed by community consent and data sovereignty protocols, sought tradition by tradition.
The index
Traditions
Listed alphabetically. Numbering follows that order and is a stable identifier shared with the project's corpus audit, not a ranking. Each entry names its region; the analysis does not treat regions as units.
All twenty-five traditions shown.
- 01
Ancient Egyptian
The Ramesside Dream Book of Papyrus Chester Beatty III, the Demotic dream books of Papyri Carlsberg XIII and XIV with related Berlin, Vienna, Florence and Copenhagen fragments, the dream ostraca of Hor of Sebennytos, incubation recipes in the Greek Magical Papyri, and royal dream stelae from Thutmose IV to Tanutamani. c. 15th century BCE – 4th century CE.
- Region
- Near East and North Africa
- Source type
- Dream-specific throughout
- Transmission
- Direct and compiled
- Repositories
- Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae · British Museum collections online · Trismegistos · Deir el-Medina Database
- 02
Ancient Mesopotamian
The Iškar Zaqīqu dream omen series, Old Babylonian omen tablets and the Mari letters — the richest ancient source of dreams actually reported to a king — and royal inscriptions from Gudea onward. 3rd millennium BCE – 1st millennium CE.
- Region
- Near East
- Source type
- Dream-specific throughout
- Transmission
- Direct and compiled
- Repositories
- Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative · ORACC · ETCSL
- 03
Arabic and Islamic
The taʿbīr manuals — the corpus transmitted under the name of Ibn Sīrīn, together with al-Nābulusī, Ibn Qutayba and al-Dīnawarī — the dream chapters of Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī and Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, dream accounts embedded in biography and chronicle from Ibn Saʿd, al-Ṭabarī and Ibn Abī al-Dunyā, and the Sufi devotional collections of al-Ghazālī, Ibn ʿArabī and al-Tirmidhī. Artemidorus reached this tradition through Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq's ninth-century translation, which is part of why the taʿbīr genre takes the shape it does. 8th – 18th century.
- Region
- Near East and North Africa
- Source type
- Dream-specific and embedded
- Transmission
- Compiled
- Repositories
- OpenITI / KITAB · al-Maktaba al-Shamela · Sunnah.com
- 04
Australian Aboriginal
Dream accounts within the ethnographic record from Spencer and Gillen through Stanner, Tonkinson and Poirier. The Dreaming — Tjukurrpa, Alcheringa and their equivalents — is a cosmological order rather than a body of dream reports, and the two are kept distinct here. 1899 – present.
- Region
- Oceania
- Source type
- Embedded throughout
- Transmission
- Mediated
- Repositories
- AIATSIS · PARADISEC
- 05
Central Asian and Turkic
Dream episodes in the Secret History of the Mongols and the Book of Dede Korkut, together with Turkic and Mongol shamanic and folk dream accounts dispersed across the ethnographic record. 13th – 20th century.
- Region
- Inner Asia
- Source type
- Embedded throughout
- Transmission
- Compiled and mediated
- Repositories
- HathiTrust · Internet Archive
- 06
Chinese
The Zhōugōng Jiěmèng oneiromantic tradition and its derivatives, dream narratives in the Taiping Guangji, Hong Mai's Yijian Zhi and the zhiguai collections, dream episodes across the dynastic histories, and Buddhist and Daoist dream accounts in canon and hagiography. 1st millennium BCE onward.
- Region
- East Asia
- Source type
- Dream-specific and embedded
- Transmission
- Compiled
- Repositories
- Chinese Text Project · CBETA · International Dunhuang Project
- 07
Contemporary Anglophone
DreamBank holds transcribed dream reports, drawn largely from North American student series and from long-run individual journals, and is the resource on which most quantitative dream-content analysis of the past three decades has been built. The Sleep and Dream Database extends that model across a wider range of material — survey series, historical collections and religious dream reports — with its own search and coding tools. The Dream Library Foundation collection is not yet digitised; its place here records an undertaking to digitise it, not an existing dataset. 20th – 21st century.
- Region
- Europe and North America
- Source type
- Dream-specific throughout
- Transmission
- Direct
- Repositories
- DreamBank · Sleep and Dream Database · Dream Library Foundation
- 08
Ethiopian and Ge'ez
Dream accounts scattered through Ge'ez hagiography — the gadl literature — and the dream episodes of the Kebra Nagast. 13th century onward.
- Region
- East Africa
- Source type
- Embedded throughout
- Transmission
- Compiled
- Repositories
- Hill Museum & Manuscript Library · British Library Ethiopic collections · BnF Éthiopien
- 09
Greco-Roman Classical
Artemidorus' Oneirocritica, the Sacred Tales of Aelius Aristides — the most extensive first-person dream diary surviving from antiquity — the Asklepian healing inscriptions at Epidauros, Hippocratic dream diagnostics in On Regimen IV, Synesius' On Dreams, and literary dreams from Homer to Cicero. 8th century BCE – 5th century CE.
- Region
- Mediterranean
- Source type
- Dream-specific and embedded
- Transmission
- Direct and compiled
- Repositories
- Perseus Digital Library · Thesaurus Linguae Graecae · Packard Humanities Institute · Loeb Classical Library
- 10
Indic
The Svapnādhyāya, the dream chapter of the Atharvaveda-Pariśiṣṭa, together with the duḥṣvapnya hymns of the Atharvaveda itself; the Svapnacintāmaṇi of Jagaddeva and related oneiromantic treatises; Jātaka and Avadāna dream narratives; dream diagnostics in the Caraka and Suśruta Saṃhitās; and epic dream episodes in the critical editions of the Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa. Vedic period – 12th century.
- Region
- South Asia
- Source type
- Dream-specific and embedded
- Transmission
- Compiled
- Repositories
- GRETIL · Digital Corpus of Sanskrit · SuttaCentral
- 11
Indigenous North American
Vision-quest accounts recorded in the Bureau of American Ethnology reports by Dorsey, Radin, Lowie, Densmore and Mooney, and Iroquois dream material from the Jesuit Relations onward. 17th century – 1930s.
- Region
- North America
- Source type
- Dream-specific throughout
- Transmission
- Mediated
- Repositories
- Smithsonian National Anthropological Archives · Endangered Languages Archive · Alaska Native Language Archive
- 12
Japanese
The Yume no Ki of the Kamakura monk Myōe Shōnin, a dream journal kept for some forty years and among the longest anywhere before the modern period; Buddhist omen-dream records in the Nihon Ryōiki and Konjaku Monogatarishū; the dream passages of the Sarashina Nikki; and the oneiric strand in classical poetry. 9th – 13th century.
- Region
- East Asia
- Source type
- Dream-specific and embedded
- Transmission
- Direct and compiled
- Repositories
- National Diet Library Digital Collections · SAT Daizōkyō
- 13
Jewish
Biblical dream narratives and the concentrated rabbinic discussion at Berakhot 55a–57b; Almoli's Sefer Pitron Ḥalomot (Salonica, c. 1516), the major Jewish dream manual; dream material in Sefer Ḥasidim; the visionary strand of the Zohar; and the dream and vision accounts of Hasidic hagiography, from Shivḥei ha-Besht onward. 1st millennium BCE – 19th century.
- Region
- Near East and diaspora
- Source type
- Dream-specific and embedded
- Transmission
- Compiled
- Repositories
- Sefaria · National Library of Israel digital collections · HebrewBooks
- 14
Korean
Mongyurok dream-journey literature and the dream-frame fiction it stands beside, haemong interpretation manuals, dream episodes throughout the Joseon Sillok — fully digitised and searchable — and the tae-mong conception-dream tradition, which has no close parallel elsewhere. Joseon period onward.
- Region
- East Asia
- Source type
- Dream-specific and embedded
- Transmission
- Compiled and mediated
- Repositories
- Joseon Sillok online database · Institute for the Translation of Korean Classics · Changsŏgak Archive
- 15
Māori
Moemoeā — dream material in Elsdon Best's Maori Religion and Mythology, dream-related articles across the Journal of the Polynesian Society, and nineteenth-century manuscript diaries in te reo Māori, first-person accounts not filtered through a European observer and the highest-value material in this tradition. 19th century – 1920s.
- Region
- Oceania
- Source type
- Dream-specific and embedded
- Transmission
- Direct and mediated
- Repositories
- New Zealand Electronic Text Collection · Papers Past · Alexander Turnbull Library · Journal of the Polynesian Society archive · Victoria University of Wellington Special Collections
- 16
Medieval European
The Somniale Danielis family, surviving in hundreds of Latin manuscripts; Macrobius' commentary on the Dream of Scipio, the theoretical spine of medieval dream thought; the dream-vision poetry it authorised, from the Roman de la Rose to Pearl and Piers Plowman; dream episodes across the Icelandic sagas; and Irish vision literature. 5th – 15th century.
- Region
- Europe
- Source type
- Dream-specific and embedded
- Transmission
- Compiled
- Repositories
- CELT · Skaldic Project · Handschriftencensus · Corpus of Middle English · Europeana
- 17
Mesoamerican
Two strands. Nahua and Aztec: the tetzahuitl omens of Book 5 of the Florentine Codex and the conquest omens of Book 12; the Nahuatl vocabulary of dreaming, including the temicamatl or dream book named among the works studied in the calmecac; and the case, argued by Araceli Rojas Martínez Gracida, that the Codex Yoalli Ehecatl — the Codex Borgia — is itself a temicamatl. Maya: Laughlin's Zinacantán dream collection, Tedlock on the K'iche' and Gossen on Chamula, with the prophetic books of Chilam Balam at the genre boundary — the chilan's utterances are prophecy received in trance rather than dreams recalled on waking, and are treated as such. 16th century – present.
- Region
- Mesoamerica
- Source type
- Dream-specific and embedded
- Transmission
- Mediated and compiled
- Repositories
- Getty Digital Florentine Codex · Ancient Americas at LACMA (formerly FAMSI) · Nahuatl Dictionary, Wired Humanities · Smithsonian Research Online
- 18
Oceanic and Pacific
Melanesian dream ethnography from Lohmann and Stephen, and Polynesian material centred on Firth's Tikopia work. 1930s – 2000s.
- Region
- Oceania
- Source type
- Dream-specific and embedded
- Transmission
- Mediated
- Repositories
- PARADISEC · Kaipuleohone · Journal of the Polynesian Society archive
- 19
Persian and Zoroastrian
The Ardā Wīrāz Nāmag, the visions of Zoroaster and Wištāsp in Dēnkard VII, Persian Islamic taʿbīr literature, and dream episodes across the classical literary canon — Shāhnāme, Ḥāfiẓ, Rūmī. Sasanian era – 19th century.
- Region
- Iran and Central Asia
- Source type
- Dream-specific and embedded
- Transmission
- Compiled
- Repositories
- OpenITI, Persian branch · Encyclopaedia Iranica · Ganjoor
- 20
Slavic
The folk dreambook, which runs as a parallel tradition across the Slavic languages — the Russian sonnik, the Polish sennik, the Czech snář, the South Slavic sanovnik — together with dream entries throughout the Prozhito diary archive, literary dreams in Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Turgenev, and dream material in the nineteenth-century folklore compilations of Afanasyev and Dal. 18th century – present.
- Region
- Central and Eastern Europe
- Source type
- Dream-specific and embedded
- Transmission
- Direct and compiled
- Repositories
- Prozhito · Fundamental Electronic Library of Russian Literature · POLONA, National Library of Poland · Manuscriptorium and Kramerius, National Library of the Czech Republic · Digital Library of Slovenia
- 21
South American
Two strands. Andean and Inca: dream and vision episodes in the colonial chronicles — Betanzos, Cristóbal de Molina, Sarmiento de Gamboa, Pachacuti Yamqui, and the indigenous-authored manuscript of Guaman Poma — together with the extirpación de idolatrías records, where dream and vision testimony appears within the record of interrogation, and the modern Quechua dream ethnography, above all Mannheim's semiotic study of Andean dreaming. Amazonian: the dream accounts of Kracke, Gregor, Descola and Santos-Granero. 16th century – present.
- Region
- South America
- Source type
- Dream-specific and embedded
- Transmission
- Mediated and compiled
- Repositories
- Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America · Endangered Languages Archive · Royal Danish Library · Biblioteca Digital Hispánica · PARES, Spanish state archives portal
- 22
Southeast Asian
Thai and Burmese dream interpretation manuscripts of the tamra fan tradition, and wangsit revelation episodes — many of them dreams — embedded in Javanese babad court chronicles. Manuscript traditions, 18th century onward.
- Region
- Southeast Asia
- Source type
- Dream-specific and embedded
- Transmission
- Compiled
- Repositories
- Digital Library of Northern Thai Manuscripts · DREAMSEA · British Library Thai manuscripts · Library of Congress Southeast Asian collections · Bayerische Staatsbibliothek
- 23
Southern and Central African
The dream sections of Callaway's Religious System of the Amazulu, Zulu dream practice as documented by Berglund and Ngubane, and Turner's Ndembu material. 1868 – 1980s.
- Region
- Southern and Central Africa
- Source type
- Dream-specific and embedded
- Transmission
- Mediated
- Repositories
- Endangered Languages Archive · HathiTrust
- 24
Tibetan
Milam dream-yoga instructional texts within the Six Yogas transmission, and the dream episodes conventional to rnam thar — the Tibetan biographical and visionary literature. 11th century onward.
- Region
- Inner Asia
- Source type
- Dream-specific and embedded
- Transmission
- Compiled
- Repositories
- Buddhist Digital Resource Center
- 25
West African
The essays collected by Jedrej and Shaw in Dreaming, Religion and Society in Africa — the one sustained comparative treatment of dreaming on the continent — and within it Shaw on Temne dreaming in Sierra Leone; Rattray on Akan dream practice; and the Islamic dream culture of Muslim West Africa, from istikhāra to the visionary narratives of the Tijāniyya and Murīdiyya. 1920s – present.
- Region
- West Africa
- Source type
- Dream-specific and embedded
- Transmission
- Mediated
- Repositories
- Endangered Languages Archive · West African Arabic Manuscript Database · Internet Archive · HathiTrust
What the corpus is not
Three asymmetries, stated plainly
A corpus assembled from twenty-five traditions is uneven by construction. Naming the unevenness is part of the method.
Scale
Contemporary research databases were built for the purpose of holding dream reports, and the modern material consequently outweighs the rest of the corpus several times over. This is a fact about digitisation history rather than about dreaming, and the analysis is designed so that it does not become a fact about the findings.
Statistical comparison accounts for these unequal proportions rather than reading across them. Each tradition enters the analysis at a weight set by what it can support, so that a pattern counts as recurrent only where it holds across traditions — not where it is frequent in the largest of them. Where a tradition is too small to carry a statistical claim, it is compared typologically, and said to be.
Transmission
For some traditions the corpus holds the dreamer's own words in translation: a Ptolemaic priest's ostraca, a Kamakura monk's journal, a Māori diary, a Soviet-era diarist. For others — every oral tradition represented here — each dream has passed through at least one layer of transcription, selection and interpretation by an outside observer. These are not the same evidential object, and the corpus marks which is which rather than flattening them.
Commensurability
An omen entry that reads if a man sees himself eating crocodile flesh: good and a dream journal entry that reads I was walking through a forest are not two instances of one thing. The genre distinction above exists so that comparison across such material has to be argued for rather than assumed, and so that claims can be limited to within-genre comparison where that is what the evidence supports.
Development priorities
Where the corpus grows next
Identified in the project's own corpus audit and sequenced as the next phase of work with tradition specialists.
- East Africa beyond Ethiopia, the Sahel, and Central Africa. Three traditions stand for the dream cultures of most of a continent.
- South Asia beyond Sanskrit and Pali. Tamil, Sinhala, Bengali and Dravidian folk traditions.
- Island and mainland Southeast Asia. Present, and limited chiefly by digitisation.
- Contemporary collections outside the Anglophone world. The strongest correction available to the corpus's present shape, and the one that stops modern standing in for Western.
- Twentieth-century material in several traditions. Korean coverage ends with the Joseon period; Indic coverage in the medieval; Slavic coverage moves from the folk dreambooks to the digital diary archive with little between.
Access and rights
What exists is not what may be used
Corpus composition records what exists in the documentary record. It does not assert a right to process it, and it does not anticipate the judgement of the specialists with whom each tradition is settled. Where material is held under restricted licence, remains undigitised, or is subject to consent still being sought, the tradition stays listed and the position is stated rather than assumed.
Several traditions here are governed by Indigenous data sovereignty protocols. Agreements are pursued with the communities and holding institutions concerned, tradition by tradition, and inclusion in this index anticipates none of them.
Provisional · revised September 2026 · audit V5