Dreams that visit us in sleep are among the experiences humanity has held most mysterious for the longest time. East and West alike, people received dreams not as mere sleep-talk but as messages telling them something. Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia had priests who specialized in reading dreams; the Greek Artemidorus left a dream manual called the "Oneirocritica"; and the Bible tells of Joseph, who saved a nation by interpreting Pharaoh's dream.
In the East, too, dreams carried deep meaning. The "Duke of Zhou's Dream Interpretations," handed down from China, long served as the standard of East Asian dream reading, and in Korea a culture of "conception dreams" took root, dreamt around the time a child is conceived. A familiar symbolic system developed alongside—reading a dream of pigs or even excrement as an auspicious omen of wealth, and dreams of dragons, tigers, or great serpents as foretelling a remarkable person. Such readings are like a kind of cultural agreement, built up over ages from the accumulated experience of people.
In the modern era, dreams were newly illuminated within psychology. The analyst Freud saw dreams as a passage through which repressed desire emerges in disguised form, and Carl Jung went a step further, understanding dreams as a place where not only the individual unconscious but the archetypes shared by all humankind speak to us. This is why many today receive a dream less as a prophecy of the future than as a mirror reflecting the state of a heart they could not quite see while awake.
So how should a dream be read? The key is not to map symbols one-to-one as in a dictionary. Just as the same water is fear to one person and purification to another, the meaning of a dream's symbol shifts with the dreamer's circumstances and emotions. A good interpretation, then, rather than declaring "this dream means such-and-such," asks "how did you feel in that scene?"—helping the dreamer find the meaning themselves. The feeling and impression right upon waking are the most honest clue of all.
FortuneLeaf's dream-interpretation content is made in this same spirit. It offers traditional symbolic readings broadly, but we encourage you to take them not as a notice of fixed fate but as a starting point for reflecting on yourself. A dream is, in the end, a short story the night hands us, and when we look upon that story tenderly, we meet a fragment of the heart's truth that the daytime had let slip by.
Since ancient times our tradition counted dreams of pigs and dragons—and, unexpectedly, dreams of excrement—among the most welcome, all regarded as auspicious omens of wealth and fortune coming in. Conversely, a dream of teeth falling out was read as a sign to check on the well-being of someone close, and a dream of clear flowing water as an omen that one's heart and circumstances would ease. What is interesting is that even the same motif carries a slightly different grain from culture to culture. In the West in the early twentieth century, Freud saw dreams as a stage where repressed desire appears in disguise, and his disciple Jung went a step further, holding that the symbols appearing in dreams reflect a deep language of the mind shared by all humanity—the archetypes. If Eastern dream reading leaned on foretelling fortune and misfortune, Western interpretation leaned on a mirror for looking within. Yet both traditions resemble each other in seeing that a dream holds a strand of the heart we have not quite become conscious of.