Memento Somnia: Dreams, and What Astrology Does Not Claim About Them

Memento Somnia is the third site in this project. Dreams, dream symbols, and the sleep science underneath them.

This post is mostly about what it will not do, because that is the more useful half. There is a long tradition of reading dreams through planetary correspondence, it would be easy to build, and it is not going to appear on either site.

What the site is

A researched database and a private journal.

• A dream symbol database covering hundreds of symbols, with the psychological reading, the cultural traditions and the sleep science kept visibly apart rather than blended into one confident answer.
• A dream journal that is private by default, because the point of writing dreams down is being honest in them.
• The sleep science: REM, sleep cycles, why recall varies from night to night, and what the research actually supports.
• Lucid dreaming, treated as a trainable skill with a real evidence base rather than a mystical achievement.
• Nightmares, and dream interpretation across traditions, the second of which is presented as cultural history rather than instruction.

It also publishes its sources, which is rarer in this subject than it should be.

Why there is no dream chart

Astrology has a strong pull toward absorbing things. Give it a subject and it will offer a correspondence, and dreams are an obvious target: vivid, hard to explain, and arriving on a date you can cast a chart for.

The reason that feature does not exist is not modesty. It is that there is no inherited system to draw on and no evidence to lean on, so building it would mean inventing a correspondence table and presenting it as though it had been handed down. That is exactly the thing this site spends its time not doing.

Compare it with the decans. The tarot attributions on the sibling tarot site are a documented nineteenth century system with named authors and a paper trail. A dream to planet mapping would have neither. The two are not the same kind of claim, and putting them side by side would suggest they were.

What actually shapes dream content is far less romantic and much better documented: when in the night you woke up, what you did that day, what you were worried about, and how badly you slept.

The one place the two genuinely help each other

The moon, and not in the way you would expect.

The research on lunar phase and sleep is thin and mixed. What exists mostly finds small effects on sleep onset and total sleep time, not on what you dream about, and neither site is going to overstate it.

But plenty of people keeping a dream journal want to log the phase beside the entry, either because they are testing the idea for themselves or because it is a useful marker for the passage of time. That is a reasonable thing to want, and it needs accurate data rather than a rounded-off app.

This site's moon calendar gives every new moon, full moon and eclipse for the year, found by searching an ephemeris rather than copied from a table, and the moon phase page gives the phase for any date you enter.

Log it as a fact about the night, next to your bedtime and what you ate. If something shows up across a few hundred entries, that is your own data, and it is worth more than anybody's correspondence table. Somnia's pattern dashboard is built for exactly that kind of question.

That is the honest shape of the overlap: this site supplies a number, that site supplies the record, and neither one tells you what the number means about the record.

What the three sites do share

Method, and an account.

The method is the same everywhere. A fixed symbol set written out by hand rather than generated, sources named, no predictions, and the line between a computed fact and a symbolic reading stated rather than blurred. On this site that means an ephemeris and a Rodden rating. On Somnia it means separating what a sleep researcher found from what a Victorian dream dictionary asserted.

The account is literal: one sign-in works across all three sites, so the address holding your birth chart here holds a dream journal there.

Where to start

Look up something you actually dreamt about in the symbol database. The entries are long, and the useful thing about them is that they label which part is evidence and which part is tradition, which will feel familiar if you have spent any time on the how it works page here.