Philo of Alexandria’s Dream Classification

The Stoic three-fold classification of dreams provided Philo with a structure upon which he built his treatise on Dreams. This treatise was meant to comment on the dreams appearing in the book of Genesis, in the strict order of their appearance in the Scripture. The classification as presented by him added a gradation which classifies dreams by their phenomenology and the clarity of the message they convey. While dreams sent by God are perfectly clear, those which have the soul as a source are obscure enough to require the intervention of a skilled interpreter. The obscurity or clarity of dreams depended on the perfection acquired by the soul of the dreamer. At this point a second three-fold classification complements the one on dreams: the classification of types of lives or types of souls, which involves a gradation of the soul in its progress towards perfection, using as examples the characters appearing in the Scriptures, mainly the Patriarchs.