Lexow’s investigators had stumbled on a contemporary version of the old art of oneiromancy, or divination through dreams. Their attempt to uncover one secret world, of urban corruption, had revealed another: an alternative logic of chance and luck operating just beneath the measured rhythms of modern life. But it was tough for a legal-minded state senator to compute. One investigator soon wanted to know if there was a “Lexow gig.” (There was not.) Investigators’ questions revealed deep incredulity about dream books—how could anything translate a dream of horses into a bet at a backroom policy shop?
They were not the first to wonder.
A half-century earlier, in 1851, Jonathan Harrington Green, an opportunistic cardsharp turned spurious antigambling reformer, published a Report on Gambling in New York. Green mapped some six thousand gambling houses in the city; by his calculation, those houses each year spelled the ruin of at least thirty thousand young men who fell into gambling’s “mad whirlpool of passion and temptation, fatal alike to their temporal and eternal interests.” Green used his own past experiences of fleecing gambling neophytes to make a case that associated luck with suckers and fraud. His campaign also made clear that part of the problem was a belief in dreams, and in his report he paused to describe a manual that had become popular in America by the time of his writing, Old Aunt Dinah’s Policy Dream Book: Comprising a Brief Collection of Dreams, Which Have Been Interpreted and Played with Wonderful Success to the Dreamer.
Published manuals of dream interpretation were an old story. One well known from antiquity was by a second-century physician from Ephesus named Artemidorus, who gathered interpretations into his five-volume Oneirocritica. Old Aunt Dinah trafficked in this ancient art but offered modern twists. The character of Old Aunt Dinah had been created by the book’s publisher with the intention of lending a kind of blackface minstrel expertise to interpretations. But most important for Green, Dinah’s dream interpretations weren’t just about foretelling the future; the book translated dreams into specific numbers to play at the policy shop.