This book partakes of a long tradition of dream interpretation, but, at the same time, is unique in its cross-cultural and interdisciplinary methods and in its mix of theoretical and analytical approaches. It includes a great chronological and geographical range, from ancient Sumeria to eighteenth-century China; medieval Hispanic dream poetry to Italian Renaissance dream theory; Shakespeare to Nerval; and from Dostoevsky, through Emily Bront , to Henry James. Rupprecht also incorporates various critical orientations including archetypal, comparative, feminist, historicist, linguistic, postmodern, psychoanalytic, religious, reader response, and self-psychology.