מדע, תרבות עממית ורציונליות בתפיסת החלום בשלהי העת העתיקה

This article explores the complex and tense relationship between the authority granted to oral and written sources in discourse about dreams in Antiquity and late Antiquity. Three different yet complementary approaches are adopted to demonstrate the complexity of this relationship. The first is that taken by modern scholarship, positioning dreams on an axis ranging from rational to irrational or from science to folklore. The second is the approach taken by the thinkers of Antiquity, in particular Aristotle, Cicero, and Artemidorus. The third and final approach, which emerges from the previous one, investigates the rational boundaries of dreams as they are reflected in rabbinic and Hellenistic literature.