DREAM GALAXY

Anecdote collection · Cities & buildings

Build a city under the plane-tree

Mount Pagus, Smyrna (İzmir) · 334 BCE (as told)

And they say he slept under this plane-tree and the goddesses of Nemesis appeared to him and bade him build a town on that site, and remove the people of Smyrna there from the old Smyrna.

Original text — Pausanias’ Description of Greece (Shilleto trans.), Pausanias; trans. A. R. Shilleto

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Source
Pausanias’ Description of Greece (Shilleto trans.) — Pausanias; trans. A. R. Shilleto, c. 150 / 1886 (trans.). Book VII, ch. 5
Rights
Public domain (author died 100+ years ago)
Record type
Anecdote collection
Place
Mount Pagus, Smyrna (İzmir) · Ancient Greek
Date
334 BCE (as told)
Uncertainty
High — From Pausanias’ Description of Greece (A. R. Shilleto trans., 1886); a local tradition recorded by a 2nd-century traveller.
Imagery
Tree · City · Water · Temple
Feelings
Awe

Another way to look at this dream

Notes on the images in this dream from psychology, myth, folklore and semiotics. Each names its source.

Tree

What kind of tree was it, and was it alive, bare, or in bloom? Does it remind you of a particular place?

Jung · The philosophical tree

Jung collected trees drawn by his patients and found in alchemy, and read them as images of slow growth — rooted below, reaching up.

C. G. Jung, “The Philosophical Tree”, Collected Works 13

Norse myth Myth & scripture

Yggdrasil, the world-ash, holds the nine worlds in its roots and branches.

Poetic Edda, “Völuspá”

Tang tale Literature

Chunyu Fen falls asleep under an old pagoda tree and dreams of a kingdom; on waking he finds it was an ants’ nest among its roots.

Li Gongzuo, “The Governor of Nanke” (c. 802)

All perspectives on tree →

City

Do you know this city? Were you looking for a way, hurrying, or lost?

Jung · The centre

In 1927 Jung dreamed of a dark, sooty Liverpool; at its centre was a square with a pool, an island and a single magnolia tree in bloom, lit as if by sunlight. He took it as an image of a centre in the psyche — what he called the Self.

C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962)

Song-dynasty memoir Literature

After Kaifeng fell, Meng Yuanlao wrote down the lost capital street by street and called the book a “dream of splendour”, comparing his memory to the Yellow Emperor waking from his dream of the land of Huaxu.

Meng Yuanlao, Dongjing Meng Hua Lu (1147), preface

Hebrew Bible Myth & scripture

The builders of Babel set out to make a city and a tower reaching heaven, and end scattered, no longer speaking one language.

Genesis 11:1–9

All perspectives on city →

Water

Was the water clear or muddy, still or rising? Which water in your own life — a place, a swim, a flood — does it bring back first?

Jung · The unconscious

Jung called water the most common image for the unconscious: something deep, below the surface, that we can look into but not see through.

C. G. Jung, “Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious”, Collected Works 9i

Classical Chinese medicine Historical medicine

The Lingshu pairs dream images with the balance of yin and yang: when yin is excessive, one “dreams of wading through great water, and is afraid”. This is a historical theory about the body, not medical advice and not a way to diagnose anything.

Huangdi Neijing, Lingshu ch. 43 “Yinxie Fameng”

Hebrew Bible; Babylonian myth Myth & scripture

Several creation stories begin with primordial water — “darkness was upon the face of the deep” in Genesis, the fresh-water Apsu in the Babylonian Enuma Elish. Here water is what exists before order.

Genesis 1:2; Enuma Elish I

All perspectives on water →

Exploration notes, not a diagnosis, a prediction, or evidence of real events.

Dreams that share its images