Dream interpretation century the English physician and writer Sir Thomas Browne wrote a short tract upon the interpretation of dreams. Dream interpretation was taken up as part of psychoanalysis at the end of the 19th century; the perceived, "manifest" content of a dream is analyzed to reveal its "latent" meaning to the psyche of the dreamer. One of the seminal works on the subject is "The Interpretation of Dreams" by Sigmund Freud. A paper in 2009 by Carey Morewedge and Michael Norton in the "Journal of Personality and Social Psychology" found that most people believe that "their dreams reveal meaningful hidden truths."
Dream interpretation would be effected through divine grace by incubating dreams within the confines of the temple. Dreams were also considered prophetic or omens of particular significance. Artemidorus of Daldis, who lived in the 2nd century AD, wrote a comprehensive text "Oneirocritica (The Interpretation of Dreams)". Although Artemidorus believed that dreams can predict the future, he presaged many contemporary approaches to dreams. He thought that the meaning of a dream image could involve puns and could be understood by decoding the image into its component words. For example, Alexander, while waging war against the Tyrians, dreamt that a satyr was dancing on