Literary dream · Cities & buildings
Pulled from her bed on her wedding night
Greece (story setting) · c. 170 CE (novel)
For I dreamed in my sleepe, that I was pulled out of our house, out of our chamber, and out of my bed, and that I removed about in solitary and unknowne places, calling upon the name of my unfortunate husband
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- Source
- The Golden Asse (Adlington trans.) — Apuleius; trans. William Adlington, c. 170 / 1566 (trans.). Book IV, ch. 21 (Adlington numbering)
- Record type
- Literary dream
- Place
- Greece (story setting) · Roman
- Date
- c. 170 CE (novel)
- Uncertainty
- High — From Apuleius’ Golden Ass (William Adlington trans., 1566); a kidnapped bride tells her dream.
- Imagery
- Partner · House · Road
- Feelings
- Fear · Loneliness · Grief
Another way to look at this dream
Notes on the images in this dream from psychology, myth, folklore and semiotics. Each names its source.
Partner
Was it your partner now, someone from the past, or someone you have never met? Was the distance between you the same as when you are awake?
Jung · Anima and animus — after the real person
Jung would first read a dreamed partner as your actual partner and relationship. Only then might the figure carry what he called the anima or animus — an inner image of the other — a framing that reflects his era’s ideas about gender.
C. G. Jung, “The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious, “Anima and Animus””, Collected Works 7
Homeric epic Classical text
After twenty years apart, Penelope tells how a likeness of Odysseus lay beside her that night, “such as he was when he went with the host”, and how she took it for real.
Homer, Odyssey XX
Han-dynasty poetry Literature
In one of the Nineteen Old Poems, a wife sleeping alone through the long nights dreams she sees her husband’s face, and he comes for her in a carriage — then is gone.
Nineteen Old Poems, “Cold, cold, the year draws to its end”
House
Whose house was it — one you know, or one you only know in the dream? Which room did you spend the most time in?
Jung · The house as psyche
In 1909 Jung dreamed of a house whose cellar led down into older and older layers — Roman, then prehistoric. He later took it as an image of the psyche, with the oldest layers at the bottom.
C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962)
Phenomenology Philosophy
Gaston Bachelard argued that the house “shelters daydreaming”: the attic and cellar of a childhood home stay with us as places to imagine from.
Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (1958)
Chinese fiction Literature
In chapter 5 of Dream of the Red Chamber, Baoyu dreams his way into the Land of Illusion, a palace of cabinets holding registers of the household’s fates.
Cao Xueqin, Dream of the Red Chamber, ch. 5
Road
Were you heading towards somewhere or leaving somewhere? Did you choose this road?
Jung · Individuation as a way
Jung often spoke of individuation as a path one has to walk oneself; no one else’s map fits exactly.
C. G. Jung, “Conscious, Unconscious, and Individuation”, Collected Works 9i
Upanishads Classical text
The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad says that in dream “there are no chariots, no harnesses, no roads — but he creates chariots, harnesses and roads”: the dreamer builds the way as they go.
Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 4.3.10
Tang tale Literature
In “The World Inside a Pillow”, a young man on the road to Handan lives a whole career in a dream while millet cooks — the source of the idiom “yellow millet dream”.
Shen Jiji, “The World Inside a Pillow” (c. 780)
Exploration notes, not a diagnosis, a prediction, or evidence of real events.
Dreams that share its images
- Chased round the stove by the devil Mission school, Wabash, Indiana · c. 1884–87
- Angina, angina! England · late 19th century
- Thou art but a dead man Gerar, Canaan · undated narrative
- A fire in a hotel in a strange city Zurich, Switzerland · c. 1913
- The earthquake is coming Zurich, Switzerland · c. 1910
- Arise, and flee into Egypt Bethlehem → Egypt · c. 1st century (narrative)