Dreams as a diagnostic tool; Dreams, Hippocrates

 Why you might read Dreams?

Dreams is a quick look into the idea that dreams are indicative of health. 

In my Self Education project, it serves to round out the corpus as well as being an interesting dive into early medical practices and what they thought was important.

The content of Dreams

Dreams details the meaning of dreams as it applies to health and illness. Hippocrates states that for religious readings go and see religious people. Most of the prescriptions are very similar to reduce food and increase exercise. This is only when the sign of the dreams is bad. It is not the first time we have seen food decreased. In this case, it is to be slowly increased over five days. This is the first time we have seen exercise prescribed.

Reflections on Dreams

It is interesting that Hippocrates does not see walking as exercise. Instead, he sees it as a thing to be done after the exercise has been done. He mainly prescribes running. He does differentiate between running around a track and heading out on a trail. He prescribes each at different times.

Most interesting is that Hippocrates thinks that dreams can diagnose health problems at all. He knows that they are the subconscious, though he calls it the soul. I guess it is an extrapolation on the dreams have spiritual significance idea. We now know that while dreams can tell us some things if they recur or themes recur. Mostly they are our subconscious processing things of the mind not diseases of the body.

What others have to say about Dreams

"Perhaps this was the first time a man came to realize that dreams do not have a divine source, and may come from human thoughts." From the sleep blog

Comparisons with other texts

Like Aphorisms, Dreams is a book of diagnostics. Aphorisms deals with almost every situation that is not dreams. Dreams fills in this gap.

The regimens we see in dreams are very different from what we see in Epidemics. In Epidemics, we are dealing with life-threatening illness'. By contrast, Dreams is almost preventative as there are no physical symptoms as yet.

Conclusion

Dreams is a book of Dream interpretations. Hippocrates links dreams with physical health and makes treatments based on them. Most of these treatments are similar when the dream is negative. This book compliments what is covered in Aphorisms but is not as robust.

Have you read Dreams? If so what did you think of it? 

 
Want to read Dreams but haven't? Please leave me a comment and let me know why you want to read it.

Hopefully, this post inspires you to take the time to look into it on your own journey of Self Education.

Get a copy of Dreams.