Omens from your dreams: An A-Z to the mysteries of sleep

What does it mean when you dream about birds, or bees? Is it a good sign to dream about fish or snakes, or are these worrying omens?Nearly 600 of the most frequent and widely reported dreams are explained and analyzed in this wide-ranging dictionary. Some of them, such as boats and maps, were first recorded thousands of years ago, but there are also meanings for dreams as up-to-date as cars and ice-cream. Keep a copy by your bed and look up your dreams before they fade.Human beings spend about a third of their total lives asleep, so it is not surprising that the dreams that come to us during this period should be the subject of endless speculation. Sometimes they are as vivid as anything we experience during our waking lives, at others we remember them only as a series of jumbled images of which we can make very little sense. In our dreams we can perform impossible actions in a world in which time, space and the order of events are hopelessly confused, or we may be haunted by nameless horrors which wake us in terror. All too frequently, the most trivial occurences or minor details of our daily lives will form the basis of substantial dreams. The author has made a thorough study of this fascinating subject, examining the beliefs of a great diversity of cultures and civilisations and incorporating their accumulated wisdom in her very readable text.OMENS FROM YOUR DREAMS, with nearly 600 entries, is one of the most comprehensive dream dictionaries ever published. It is an invaluable reference book, to be dipped into or browsed over, offering the reader detailed explanations of the most common images and symbols found in dreams and providing a wide range of interpretations from the ideas of the philosophers of antiquity to the theories of modern psychology.