This essay argues that the dream narratives in Girolamo Cardano’s autobiography De vita proper liber (written 1575) share important characteristics with the didactic and exemplary uses of dreams in late classical and medieval hagiography. While not a piece of hagiography in itself, Cardano’s book features dreams with a particularly rich indebtedness to Christian and hagiographic devices such as the “upward ascent” narrative also found in saints’ dreams. Moreover, Cardano’s dreams, the Christian element of which has been underplayed by scholars, also posit the dreamer as a mediator between God and audience in ways that my article relates to the exemplary force in divine dreams. Thus, in the extension the article also deals with how to mediate dreams (editing them, writing them down, conferring authority on them) and investigates the senses in which dreams achieved status as “true” or “prophetic”.