A man dreamt that he turned into the River Xanthus in Troy.

He bled for ten years...

Still, he did not die, which was quite understandable, since the river is immortal.

EDITOR'S NOTE

Artemidorus is often put down by modern psychologists as superstitious for treating dreams as oracles--about the future, not the past or present (as in most modern dream theories). But Artemidorus was a working dream-interpreter, not a therapist. People didn't pay to have ordinary anxiety dreams interpreted; it was precisely the bewildering, oracular ones they brought to him. Psychological insight wasn't as valuable as survival tips.

If you can cross the cultural gulf between his era and ours, you'll find him far more nuanced than his reputation. He flatly denies that symbols have fixed meanings; this alone puts him ahead of all dream-guides til 1900, and most since. His examples may not please us (he says he'd interpret the same dream reported by a slave and a rich citizen differently) but for Roman society that's just realism. Gender, family, class and nationality determined your options. We expect dreams to guide individuation, but even the poorest person today has more opportunity to follow individualistic dreams than Roman citizens did.

So here, for Artemidorus, being a river suggests copious long-term bleeding, but not fatal bleeding--in the opinion of the patient's own body, which Artemidorus trusted to know best.

Or at least better than the doctors of his time.

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