Anecdote collection · Death & the departed
His daughter took away his armour
Ithome, Messenia · c. 724 BCE (as told)
He dreamed that he was going out to battle fully armed, and saw lying on a table the victims’ entrails, and his daughter appeared to him in a black dress with her breast and belly ripped up, and he thought she threw away what was on the table, and took away his armour, and instead of it put upon him a golden crown and white robe.
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- Source
- Pausanias’ Description of Greece (Shilleto trans.) — Pausanias; trans. A. R. Shilleto, c. 150 / 1886 (trans.). Book IV, ch. 13
- Record type
- Anecdote collection
- Place
- Ithome, Messenia · Ancient Greek
- Date
- c. 724 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
- Child · War · The dead · Ruler
- Feelings
- Grief · Unease · Horror
Another way to look at this dream
Notes on the images in this dream from psychology, myth, folklore and semiotics. Each names its source.
Child
Whose child was it — yours, someone you know, or yourself when young? What did the child need?
Jung · The child archetype
Jung described the “child” in dreams and myth as an image of what is not yet — a beginning, small and easy to overlook, that carries a future.
C. G. Jung, “The Psychology of the Child Archetype”, Collected Works 9i
Psychoanalysis Depth psychology
Freud began his theory with children’s dreams, which he found to be plain, undisguised wishes — a trip promised, a treat withheld.
Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), ch. III
East Asian custom Folk saying
In China and Korea (where it is called taemong), “conception dreams” before a birth are a living custom, often retold within families.
East Asian folk custom
War
In the war, were you a soldier, someone fleeing, or watching from outside? Was there a particular enemy?
Homeric epic Classical text
Zeus sends Agamemnon a deliberately false dream promising that Troy will fall at once. The epic itself treats a war dream as something that can mislead.
Homer, Iliad II
Song-dynasty poetry Literature
Lu You and Xin Qiji, both kept from the frontier they longed to recover, kept dreaming of battle; their war dreams are read today as poems of unfulfilled duty.
Lu You; Xin Qiji
The dead
Who was it, and did they seem to know they had died? Was there something you were able to say, or not able to?
Jung · Objective level first
Jung’s memoir records his own dreams of his late father and treats them with seriousness rather than symbol-hunting: a dream of someone who has died is first about that person and that bond.
C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962)
Early dream research Dream research
Ellis devoted a chapter to dreams of the dead, noting how often the dead appear as if alive and how such dreams can bring comfort.
Havelock Ellis, The World of Dreams (1911), ch. VIII
Homeric epic Classical text
Achilles dreams of the dead Patroclus, who asks to be buried; Achilles reaches out to embrace him and grasps nothing.
Homer, Iliad XXIII
Exploration notes, not a diagnosis, a prediction, or evidence of real events.
Dreams that share its images
- My son would be killed by an iron spear Sardis, Lydia · c. 550 BCE (as told)
- Two women yoked to my son’s chariot Susa (setting) · 472 BCE (play)
- Hector’s ghost before my sight Troy (setting) · 19 BCE (poem)
- You sleep, Achilles, and have forgotten me Troy (setting) · c. 8th century BCE
- The white horse at dawn Tokyo, Japan · 1908
- Easter morning, cattle on the graves Grasmere, England · c. 1819