Oneiromancy

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Oneiromancy

Term for divination by dreams, possibly the oldest of the divinatory systems. Written records exist of dream interpretation in a papyrus ca. 1250 B.C.E. Prophetic dreams involving the interpretation of symbolic images and information are also in biblical history (See Gen. 41:1-36; Matt. 2:12, 22).

Psychologists and psychoanalysts claim that dreams include symbolic hopes and fears, sexual anxieties, and recollections of past events, as well as possible precognitive images. An attempt to isolate claimed precognitive factors in dreams was made by J. W. Dunne (1875-1949) in his book An Experiment With Time (1927).