This is the most noble of the five dreams in the Commentary and it has several subsections, but in essence it describes a dream that conceals with “strange shapes and veils with ambiguity the true meaning of the information being offered and which requires an interpretation for its understanding”. Macrobius saw little to explain further what it meant as he felt it was obvious and that everybody knew from experience what it was. He gave this dream five varieties: Personal, Alien, Social, Public and Universal. It is called Personal when one dreams of that he himself is doing or experiencing something. And Alien, when he dreams this about someone else. It is called Social, when his dream involves others and himself; Public when he dreams that some misfortune or benefit has befallen the city, forum, theatre, public walls, or other public enterprise. And finally Universal; when he dreams that some change has taken place in the sun, moon, planets, sky or regions of the earth. Macrobius believed Somnium to be the most noble dream in the Commentary because Scipio incorporates all of the other dreams inside of it. 

So how would one go about to update the interpretation of Somnium for our age? It is worth a brief attempt. The variety of the Public part of the Enigmatic dream can be the equivalent of todays’ media culture and information age. The Universal part of the dream can easily be compared to climate change, solar flares that disrupt our communications, satellites that fall out of the sky, but also achievements such as land reclamation, vast engineering projects for the benefit of mankind and nature conservation. The Enigmatic Dream is not so much a dream as it is a form of insight, equivalent in our own time to that of acquiring wisdom from a lengthy thought process. Perhaps it could be be equated from today’s vantage point to that of meditation.