Polysemy and Its Vicissitudes: Oneirocritical Hermeneutics in Sura and Vienna

Dreams have an aura of mystery. To the Talmudist they are oracular. For Freud they represent a dark unknown: the drive dominated cauldron of unconscious desire. Babylonian Sura and Vienna were both Diaspora for the authors of canonical texts on dream interpretation. Remarkably, both Freud and the Talmud brought similar assumptions to this obscure playing field: Dreams hide a "truly real" but deferred meaning, they are polysemic and there are invariant symbols encrypted in their condensed "plastic" imagery. These assumptions allowed ancient interpreters to predict future events and psychoanalysts to uncover past infantile wishes and psychosexual conflict. A "hermeneutics of suspicion" resulted in techniques that empowered an enfranchised interpreter to "cure" and ameliorate the dream's meanings and portents.