The Dream Oracles

For over a thousand years, the ancient worlds answer to sickness and uncertainty was a bed in a temple — and a god who visited in dreams.

From the healing sanctuaries of Egypt and Greece to the saints shrines of Byzantium and the prayer-dreams of the Islamic world, sleeping in a holy place to wake with an answer was not a fringe custom. It was an institution, with dormitories, priests, fees, case files and critics. The Dream Oracles is the documentary history of that institution, told from its own records: cure inscriptions, dream books, patients diaries and the stones of the shrines themselves.

This is a history, not a manual. The rites are described as the sources preserve them, the legends are labelled as legends, and every chapter asks what the evidence can — and cannot — prove.

Inside youll discover

- The Epidaurus iamata: some seventy cure stories carved in stone, including Cleos five-year pregnancy and the sceptic the god renamed Incredulous

- The Chester Beatty Dream Book, the oldest surviving dream dictionary, and what its entries reveal about ordinary Egyptian fears

- How the Asclepieia of Epidaurus, Cos and Pergamon actually ran — purification, fees, dormitories, temple servants and serpents

- Aelius Aristides Sacred Tales, the dream diary of antiquitys most demanding patient

- How Christian saints took over the abatons business, and how the practice rebuilt itself in Judaism and Islam as the dream question and istikhara

- The dream traditions of China, India and Tibet, and the archaeology — votives, dormitories, pilgrim graffiti — that shows who really came

Who this book is for

Readers of narrative ancient history, students of comparative religion, and anyone who has wondered what people actually did, paid and recorded at the famous healing shrines — beyond the myths.

Thomas Somner writes documentary histories of the ancient worlds institutions, built chapter by chapter from inscriptions, papyri and surviving texts.

The dreamers left records. This book reads them.