The Somniale Danielis and the dream books of the Middle Ages

The theologians of the Christian Middle Ages regarded dream interpretation with suspicion, yet it by no means disappeared. Alongside learned treatises there circulated small practical handbooks, copied in monasteries and later translated into the vernacular languages. The most widespread of all bore the name of an unquestionable biblical authority: the prophet Daniel, interpreter of Nebuchadnezzar's dreams. This is the Somniale Danielis, a text modest in ambition but extraordinary in diffusion, which accompanied European readers for almost a thousand years.

An alphabetical list

The Somniale Danielis is built like a dictionary. Each entry gives in a few words a dreamt image and its meaning: seeing birds, receiving a ring, washing one's hands, crossing a river. The entries are arranged in alphabetical order according to the main Latin word, so that readers could quickly find what they were looking for, without any particular expertise.

Unlike the Oneirocritica of Artemidorus, the book takes no account of the dreamer or of the context. Each image has only one meaning, usually brief: joy, gain, harm, quarrel, honour. This simplicity explains its success, but also the contempt of many intellectuals of the time, who considered it an instrument of popular superstition.

Origins and transmission

The Latin text descends from Greek models of late antique or Byzantine date, also attributed to Daniel. The earliest Latin manuscripts go back to the early Middle Ages, around the ninth century, and there are many different versions, longer or shorter. In the eleventh century it was translated into Old English, and in the following centuries it appeared in French, German, Italian and other languages.

With the invention of printing, in the second half of the fifteenth century, the Somniale went through many cheap editions, often under different titles. Alongside it circulated the so-called dream lunaries, which gave dreams different meanings according to the day of the lunar month on which they occurred, and short treatises that linked the value of a dream to the hours of the night.

Between Byzantium, Islam and the West

In the Byzantine world a much larger treatise enjoyed great success: the Oneirocriticon attributed to a certain Achmet, probably composed between the ninth and eleventh centuries, which reworks material of Arabic origin in a Christian key. In 1176 Leo Tuscus, a Pisan active in Constantinople, translated it into Latin, making it known in the West as a learned and authoritative text.

Medieval intellectuals meanwhile debated the value of dreams with theological arguments. John of Salisbury, in the Policraticus of 1159, condemned those who entrusted their decisions to dream books, while acknowledging that God could speak in dreams to the righteous. The tension between theology and popular practice accompanied these texts for centuries. In the thirteenth century Thomas Aquinas, too, distinguished the natural causes of dreams from the supernatural ones.

The Somniale Danielis thus remains a precious document of the medieval mentality. Its brief formulas reveal which images struck the imagination of ordinary people, which fears and hopes they entrusted to the night, and how the biblical figure of Daniel had become, in popular culture, almost the patron of dream interpreters.