This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
People gathers three of the atlas's dream symbols, close family figures rather than strangers, and the mother is the one point where the ancient and modern readings demonstrably touch.
Artemidorus devotes a long, famous passage of his first book to dreaming of intercourse with one's mother, reading most cases politically, as possession of one's native land or mastery of one's craft. Freud cites him directly and turns the same material toward the Oedipus complex, a reading of Artemidorus rather than an inheritance from him; Jung's Great Mother, distinguishing the personal mother from a nourishing and devouring mother image, is a third, separate proposal. Freud also read parents generally as royal or exalted figures, and hollow, enclosing objects, rooms, vessels, ships, as standing for the mother or the female body.
The father gets a narrower treatment. Artemidorus reads a dream father as the actual father or those standing in his place, interpreted through relation and circumstance rather than any principle of authority. Freud made the father the central figure of his account of dreams and neurosis, reading dream authority figures as displacements of him, the death of a same-sex parent among his typical dreams and read as unconscious ambivalence rather than a literal wish. Jung's own contribution, the wise old man, is a separate archetype, not the same figure as a personal father.
Artemidorus interprets a dream baby by circumstance and sex, concerned with inheritance and household rather than any inner state, and the Talmud gives a rooster as a sign of a male child. Freud read children as appearing disguised as little animals or vermin, and Jung treated the child as an archetype of wholeness, the divine child, rather than a memory of an actual infant.