An important part of age-old human attempts to cope with the otherness of the dream is the so-called ›dream-discourse‹, which tries to explain the origin of dreams, their bizarre appearance, their functions, and the methods for detecting the information which they may contain. This collection of essays will reconstruct dream-discourses from many cultures and time periods, together with the dream knowledge of important literary authors. The scope of the contributions ranges geographically from India, China, and Korea to diverse European countries and historically from Antiquity to the present, including studies on Gauḍapāda, Confucius, Hŏ Kyun, Ji Yun, Sŏng Chewŏn, Homer, Aristotle, Cicero, Artemidorus, Augustine of Hippo, Hildegard of Bingen, Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Béroalde de Verville, Athanasius Kircher, Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Novalis, Schubert, Troxler, Carus, Novalis, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Nodier, Nerval, Victor Hugo, Serrurier, Moreau de la Sarthe, Maury, Hervey de Saint-Denys, Baudelaire, Lautréamont, Freud, Jung, Proust, Joyce, Kafka, Marinetti, Tzara, Breton, representatives of current empirical dream research and many other dream theoreticians.