Artemidorus gives an account of Greco-Roman dream-life that goes down to the most trivial minutiae. For example, a lot of book one of the Oenirocriticon is about what you eat when you’re asleep. Some things are good signs, others not so much. Meat, generally speaking, is a good omen, with a few exceptions. Eating your own livestock is bad, because it means you’re going to lose a member of your household. As Artemidorus explains, “livestock are nothing other than human beings.” It’s fine if you’re eating people, you just don’t want to be eating your own people.
People meat, actually, turns out to be the best sign of all (beating out pork by a hair). That’s because, tropon tina, people eat one another when they help one another; so, if you eat someone, they’re going to do you a big favor. You want this to be a stranger, of course. If you eat someone in your household, that means the same thing as eating livestock, which is that you’ll soon have a death in the family. The exception (there’s always exceptions within exceptions for Artemidorus, which is what qualifies him by ancient standards as a scientific expert) is in case you’re eating those parts of your child “through which the child makes a living,” for instance the feet of a runner or the shoulders of a boxer or the hands of a craftsman. That means your child will provide for you in your old age.
One of the appealing things about Artemidorus for an ancient reader, I’d imagine, is his knack for putting a reassuring spin on objectively troubling dreams. That’s evident in his interpretations of the cannibal nightmares above, as well as in the interpretations he offers for incest dreams a little further on. Dreaming about having sex with your mother (the subtleties of which “have escaped other dream interpreters,” but not Artemidorus, who devotes several pages to them) isn’t always a bad thing; sometimes it means you’ll be put in a position of power, sometimes it means you’ll come into an inheritance. Everything depends on sexual position, whether the sex is voluntary or not, whether your mother’s alive or dead, etc. The very process of breaking the dream down into such a sequence of details, however, must already do something to lessen the shock of the whole.
One kind of dream sex that’s almost universally a bad sign, though, is oral penetration. The word Artemidorus uses for this, arretopoesis, doesn’t show up in most Greek dictionaries but does have an obvious double-entendre etymology that may explain why he regards it so negatively. It means to do something unspeakable, but also to render somebody speechless. The only person for whom arretopoesis turns out to be a good sign is the rhetor, who obviously wants to make his opponents unable to speak.