why the word "read" has its root in "rædan", "raden" and "raten" (respectively, Germanic, Dutch and German) which makes a reader, roughly "an interpreter of dreams."
I'm not sure about oneiromantic etymologies, but according to Kluge, Etymologisches Wörterbuch, Rat 'council, advice' and raten 'to advise, give council' occur in most of the Germanic languages. There's even a Gothic verb, garedan 'Vorsorge treffen / to look ahead, provide for risk'. He ties in raten and lesen with unravelling (lit. unriddling) the runes / "die Runen enträtseln". German lesen, like Latin lego and Gk λεγω lego (and λογος logos 'word; reason', but translated by the Romans as ratio 'reckoning') have primary meanings of gathering together. Sounds partially like augury, or later on, hermeneutics, to me. There's also some connection between counting, recounting, telling a tale, and gathering knowledge or portents about the future: cf. English tell, tale, and German zahlen 'to pay', zählen 'to count', and erzählen 'to tell'. Also, the German word for letters of the alphabet Buchstabe where the morpheme Stab means a kind of wand or staff. Kluge mentions that Tacitus, in the 10th chapter of Germania describes how Germans made marks on twigs and threw them (like the I Ching?), interpreting the results, and connects this with runes.
