This volume centers on dreams in Greek medicine from the fifth-century B.C.E. Hippocratic Regimen down to the modern era. Medicine is here defined in a wider sense than just formal medical praxis, and includes non-formal medical healing methods such as folk pharmacopeia, religion, ’magical’ methods (e.g., amulets, exorcisms, and spells), and home remedies. This volume examines how in Greek culture dreams have played an integral part in formal and non-formal means of healing. The papers are organized into three major diachronic periods. The first group focuses on the classical Greek through late Roman Greek periods. Topics include dreams in the Hippocratic corpus; the cult of the god Asclepius and its healing centers, with their incubation and miracle dream-cures; dreams in the writings of Galen and other medical writers of the Roman Empire; and medical dreams in popular oneirocritic texts, especially the second-century C.E. dreambook by Artemidorus of Daldis, the most noted professional dream interpreter of antiquity. The second group of papers looks to the Christian Byzantine era, when dream incubation and dream healings were practised at churches and shrines, carried out by living and dead saints. Also discussed are dreams as a medical tool used by physicians in their hospital praxis and in the practical medical texts (iatrosophia) that they and laypeople consulted for the healing of disease. The final papers deal with dreams and healing in Greece from the Turkish period of Greece down to the current day in the Greek islands. The concluding chapter brings the book a full circle by discussing how modern psychotherapists and psychologists use Ascelpian dream-rituals on pilgrimages to Greece.

On publication in 2012, Dreaming and Historical Consciousness in Island Greece quickly met wide acclaim as a gripping work that, according to the Times Literary Supplement, “offers a wholly new way of thinking about dreams in their social contexts.” It tells an extraordinary story of spiritual fervor, prophecy, and the ghosts of the distant past coming alive in the present. This new affordable paperback brings it to the wider audience that it deserves. Charles Stewart tells the story of the inhabitants of Kóronos, on the Greek island of Naxos, who, in the 1830s, began experiencing dreams in which the Virgin Mary instructed them to search for buried Christian icons nearby and build a church to house the ones they found. Miraculously, they dug and found several icons and human remains, and at night the ancient owners of them would speak to them in dreams. The inhabitants built the church and in the years since have experienced further waves of dreams and startling prophesies that shaped their understanding of the past and future and often put them at odds with state authorities. Today, Kóronos is the site of one of the largest annual pilgrimages in the Mediterranean. Telling this fascinating story, Stewart draws on his long-term fieldwork and original historical sources to explore dreaming as a mediator of historical change, while widening the understanding of historical consciousness and history itself.

A groundbreaking history of the human mind told through our experience of dreams—from the earliest accounts to current scientific findings—and their essential role in the formation of who we are and the world we have made. "A resounding case for the mystery, beauty and cognitive importance of dreams." —The New York Times What is a dream? Why do we dream? How do our bodies and minds use them? These questions are the starting point for this unprecedented study of the role and significance of this phenomenon. An inves­tigation on a grand scale, it encompasses literature, anthropology, religion, and science, articulating the essential place dreams occupy in human culture and how they functioned as the catalyst that compelled us to transform our earthly habitat into a human world. From the earliest cave paintings—where Sidarta Ribeiro locates a key to humankind’s first dreams and how they contributed to our capacity to perceive past and future and our ability to conceive of the existence of souls and spirits—to today’s cutting-edge scientific research, Ribeiro arrives at revolutionary conclusions about the role of dreams in human existence and evolution. He explores the advances that contempo­rary neuroscience, biochemistry, and psychology have made into the connections between sleep, dreams, and learning. He explains what dreams have taught us about the neural basis of memory and the transfor­mation of memory in recall. And he makes clear that the earliest insight into dreams as oracular has been elucidated by contemporary research. Accessible, authoritative, and fascinating, The Oracle of Night gives us a wholly new way to under­stand this most basic of human experiences.

Dreams and History contains important new scholarship on Freud's Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and subsequent psychoanalytical approaches from distinguished historians, psychoanalysts, historians of science and anthropologists.

This collection of essays, dedicated to A.H.M. Kessels, provides an overview of modern Dutch scholarship in Greek and Latin studies with special emphasis on dreams in classical literature, classical drama and the reception of Homer.