Oneiromancer

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

  1. Someone who analyzes dreams to foresee future events
  2. A person who uses the content of dreams as a tool for prophecy
  3. An individual who interprets the symbolic meaning of dreams to divine what may happen

Etymology: When plague struck the Greek camp at Troy, Achilles proposed consulting a seer, a priest, or an "oneiropolos," a man who dealt in dreams. The dream-reader was already a recognized profession in the opening book of the Iliad, and he would keep his trade for millennia. The first half of the word is Greek "oneiros," dream. Homer's Penelope explains that dreams reach mortals through two gates. False ones pass through ivory, "elephas," which echoes a Greek verb for "to deceive." True ones pass through horn, "keras," which echoes a verb for "to fulfil." The skill lay in telling which gate a dream had come through. By the second century AD, Artemidorus of Daldis had written the "Oneirocritica," a sprawling manual of dream meanings that would still be translated and consulted in Renaissance Europe. The second half comes from Greek "manteia," divination, from "mantis," a seer, a word related to "mania," madness. The prophet was imagined as someone seized by a god. The praying mantis owes its name to the same root, for its pose of a seer at prayer. The ending reached English through Latin and French in older words like "necromancer." In medieval Latin that word was bent into "nigromantia," as though it meant "black" magic rather than consultation of the dead. English built "oneiromancy" from these Greek parts, and the word appears by the 1650s. "Oneiromancer" is a learned construction on the same pattern. It is not a borrowing of anything the Greeks themselves said; they spoke of the "oneirokritēs," the dream-judge. The oneiromancer's art took an unexpected turn in 1899, when Sigmund Freud published "The Interpretation of Dreams." Dreams were still treated as coded messages worth decoding, but the code now pointed backward, into the dreamer's past, rather than forward into the future.

Synonyms: dream interpreter, dream analyst, dream reader, vision seer, dream oracle