Book two of the Oneirocriticon completes its author’s natural history of the dream-life. Following a pattern established by earlier encyclopedists, Artemidorus of Daldis has interpreted the whole world – from humans to minerals to animals, fish and birds – as dream symbols. Fittingly enough (and excluding “off topic sections on dream flight and the numerology of the human lifespan which is meant to remind us that he’s a “real scientist”), Artemidorus concludes by talking about the dead.
If you’ve been raised on a steady diet of modern horror movies, you’ll expect that seeing dead people is never a good sign. Artemidorus confirms this expectation at a few points – you don’t want dead people to be going after your posessions, for instance, and especially not your clothing, which would mean that you’re going to die. On the other hand, dead people per se are actually a good sign in a lot of situations. As usual in the Oneirocriticon, the dreamer’s status and state of mind matter a lot.
If you’re really worried about something, for instance, seeing a dead person means you’re in the clear. That’s because people in the afterlife are chill: they don’t worry about anything, since they’re dead. As Artemidorus explains a little later with respect to whom you can trust in a dream – and dead people are very trustworthy, as it turns out – most people deceive themselves and others because of hopes and fears, phoboumenoi e elpizontes. Dead people neither fear nor hope for anything. Why would they? There’s nothing worse that can happen to you than death, which takes away all grounds for hope.
For similar reasons, it’s pretty good news for slaves to see a revenant. That’s because the dead have no masters: they’re anupotaktos, uncommanded. To dream of dead people, then, predicts freedom, which is what (on Artemidorus’ account, and it would be really interesting to know how accurate this was for the Roman context) slaves most of all want.
On the whole, you can see that the Oneirocriticon cultivates a much more friendly and less fearful relationship to the dead than we might have expected. Part of this is just the author’s contrarianism: a long polemic section on the interpretation of nightingales suggests that earlier books of dream-interpretation had been more uniform in assigning a negative meaning to symbols and signs associated with death. Artemidorus’ revisionist approach here might be part of a rhetoric of progress and experimentation by which he asserts his own superiority over his predecessors in the art.
In most cases, though, we can verify that his innovations take advantage of pre-existing cultural symbolisms rather than inventing new ones. This holds good for the dead, as well: the characterization of death as a state of lack on which Artemidorus is building goes back at least to Greek tragedy, where Antigone’s characterization of her own future corpse as aphilos, agamos, anumenaios, aklautos and alektos is not at all untypical. Even in Homer, what’s striking about the dead (for Odysseus, anyway) is their lack of body and even of mind. Death means something’s missing.
Most of the time, you don’t want to lose what death takes away. On the other hand, as Artemidorus points out, you sometimes do. If death didn’t come with certain advantages, there wouldn’t be such a thing as the death wish – and, to avoid anachronism, the Stoics wouldn’t have recommended it as a way out from intolerable situations. The readings presented in the Oneirocriticon draw out the implications of that attitude and, incidentally, show how different the ancient conception of death was from our own.