Dreams in late antiquity : studies in the imagination of a culture / Patricia Cox Miller.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [255]-270) and index.

Part I - Images and Concepts of Dreaming. -- 1 Figurations of Dream. -- 2 Theories of Dreams. -- 3 Interpretation of Dreams. 4 Dreams and Therapy. -- Part II - Dreamers. -- 5 Hermas and the Shepherd. -- 6 Perpetua and Her Diary of Dreams. -- 7 Aelius Aristides and The Sacred Tales. -- 8 Jerome and His Dreams. -- 9 The Two Gregorys and Ascetic Dreaming

'Dream interpretation was a prominent feature of the intellectual and imaginative world of late antiquity, for martyrs and magicians, philosophers and theologians, polytheists and monotheists alike. Finding it difficult to account for the prefvalence of dream-divination, modern scholarship has often condemned it as a cultural weakness, a mass lapse into mere superstition.....this book...draws on pagan, Jewish, and Christian sources and modern semiotic theory to demonstrate the integral importance of dreams in late-antique thought and life....Graeco-Roman dream literature functioned as a language of signs that formed a personal and cultural pattern of imagination and gave tangible substance to ideas such as time, cosmic history, and the self.'

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