This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Beings gathers the atlas's four dream symbols naming a figure encountered in sleep rather than an object or an action, and the four could hardly come from more different sources.
The angel and the ghost both belong to a real historical type of dream, the visitation, in which the dead or the divine appear and are taken as a genuine encounter rather than a symbol needing decoding. An angel instructs Jacob at Bethel and Joseph four times in Matthew, and Artemidorus separated such theorematic dreams, which show plainly what will happen, from allegorical ones needing interpretation; the reassuring modern reading of an angel as comfort and guidance softens a tradition in which the message was usually a command. The visitation of the dead is among the best attested dream types in the ancient world, Patroclus appearing to Achilles to demand burial being the classic case, and modern bereavement research documents such dreams as common and often consoling, a continuity the psychological reading of the ghost as unresolved guilt displaces rather than extends.
The demon has a long medical history running alongside its religious one: Greek and Latin writers describe a crushing night visitor later moralised into a demon, and sleep science now identifies the experience as sleep paralysis with hypnagogic hallucination. The shadow is not a traditional symbol at all but Carl Jung's own named technical term for the qualities a person refuses to recognise in themselves, and belongs to his theory rather than to any older reading.