require interpretation. Then He said, Hear now my words: If there is a prophet among you, I, the Lord, make Myself known to him in a vision; I speak to him in a dream. Not so with My servant Moses; he is faithful in all My house. I speak with him face to face, even plainly, and not in dark sayings… (Numbers 12:6-8a, emphasis added).
We found the first account of dream interpretation in the Bible, in Genesis 37:8, where Joseph’s brother’s interpreted his dream about their sheaves bowed down to his. Jacob probably taught them how to interpret dreams, which he must have learned from his grandfather Abraham and father Isaac. In the accounts of Joseph and Daniel we found that beside themselves magicians were also interpreters of dreams. So dream interpretation was practiced since ancient times.
Historical background of dreams in modern times
Artemidorus of Daldus (AD 138-180), a Roman philosopher, studied symbols in dreams. He interviewed dream interpreters throughout Italy, Greece and the Near East, and noted that dreams could rarely be taken at face value. In his book “Interpretation of Dreams”, he established principals for the interpretation of fundamental types of symbols and images appearing in dreams. His work foreshadowed in many ways the work of Freud and Jung, eighteen hundred years later, and provides an important link between the ancient and modern methods of dream interpretation.
The Christian theologian Gregory of Nyassa (AD 331-395) published a treatise entitled “On the Making of Man”, wherein he stated that dreams occur in sleep because the rational intellect is at rest. Because the intellect is resting, the dream mind can work through the day’s activities.
In the