DREAM GALAXY

Literary dream · Nature & weather

A boy mounted on a lion

India (story setting) · c. 1070 (compiled)

Then once upon a time the god of the moony crest said to him in a dream—“While wandering in the forest thou shalt behold a boy mounted on a lion, take him and go home, he shall be thy son.” Then the king woke up, and rejoiced remembering that dream

Original text — The Kathá Sarit Ságara, or Ocean of the Streams of Story (Tawney trans.), Somadeva; trans. C. H. Tawney

Open this dream in the galaxy →

Source
The Kathá Sarit Ságara, or Ocean of the Streams of Story (Tawney trans.) — Somadeva; trans. C. H. Tawney, c. 1070 / 1880–84 (trans.). Ch. VI
Rights
Public domain (author died 100+ years ago)
Record type
Literary dream
Place
India (story setting) · Indian
Date
c. 1070 (compiled)
Uncertainty
High — From the Kathāsaritsāgara, Somadeva’s 11th-century Sanskrit story collection (C. H. Tawney trans., 1880–84); a story-dream, not a personal report.
Imagery
Child · Animals · Forest · Ruler
Feelings
Joy · Longing

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

All perspectives on child →

Animals

What was the animal like — wild or tame, chasing you or keeping you company? Have you known an animal like it?

Jung · Instinct

In the Jungian book Man and His Symbols, animals in dreams are often read as instinct given a body — a part of us that is older than words.

Aniela Jaffé, “Symbolism in the Visual Arts”, in Man and His Symbols (1964)

Book of Songs Classical text

A Zhou-dynasty song records a dream reading: bears foretell sons, snakes foretell daughters. It shows how early animal dreams were read as signs about family.

Book of Songs, “Si Gan”

Hebrew Bible Myth & scripture

Pharaoh dreams of seven fat cows eaten by seven lean ones; Joseph reads them as years of plenty and famine — and says interpretation “belongs to God”, not to him.

Genesis 41; 40:8

All perspectives on animals →

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 →

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

Dreams that share its images