DREAM GALAXY

Anecdote collection · Flight & sky

A youth let down on a golden chain

Rome, Italy · c. 50 BCE

in which he saw a comely youth, let down from heaven by a golden chain, who stood at the door of the Capitol, and had a whip put into his hands by Jupiter. And immediately upon sight of Augustus, who had been sent for by his uncle Caesar to the sacrifice, and was as yet perfectly unknown to most of the company, he affirmed that it was the very boy he had seen in his dream.

Original text — The Lives of the Twelve Caesars (Thomson trans., rev. Forester), Suetonius; trans. Alexander Thomson, rev. T. Forester

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Source
The Lives of the Twelve Caesars (Thomson trans., rev. Forester) — Suetonius; trans. Alexander Thomson, rev. T. Forester, c. 121 / 1796 (trans.). Augustus, ch. XCIV
Rights
Public domain (author died 100+ years ago)
Record type
Anecdote collection
Place
Rome, Italy · Roman
Date
c. 50 BCE
Uncertainty
High — From Suetonius’ Lives of the Twelve Caesars (A. Thomson trans., rev. T. Forester); an omen-dream reported by a Roman biographer.
Imagery
Ladder · Sky · Gate · Child
Feelings
Wonder · 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.

Stairs

Were you going up or down, and was it easy? Did the stairs lead somewhere you recognised?

Jung · Individuation

Jung called the lifelong process of becoming more whole “individuation”, and saw it as a gradual movement rather than a single arrival.

C. G. Jung, “Conscious, Unconscious, and Individuation”, Collected Works 9i

Hebrew Bible Myth & scripture

Jacob dreams of a ladder set on the earth with its top reaching heaven, angels going up and down it — a link between two worlds.

Genesis 28:12

Psychoanalysis Depth psychology

Freud read climbing stairs as a sexual symbol. Many later readers treat this as one of his most over-extended claims, and it is shown here as history, not as a key.

Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), ch. VI

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Sky

What colour was the sky, and how far away? Were you under it, or up inside it?

Daoist classic Classical text

In the Liezi, King Mu of Zhou is carried up into a magician’s palace in the sky. He returns to find he never left his seat: “we were wandering in spirit,” the magician says — “why would the body move?”

Liezi, “King Mu of Zhou”

Roman philosophy Philosophy

In Cicero’s “Dream of Scipio”, the dreamer is taken up among the heavens and looks back at an Earth so small that Rome’s empire seems a speck.

Cicero, De re publica VI (“Dream of Scipio”)

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Gate

Was the door open, closed, or locked — and did you want to go through it?

Ancient Greece Classical text

Penelope says dreams come through two gates: those through polished ivory deceive, those through horn come true. Even in Homer, not every dream was to be trusted.

Homer, Odyssey XIX

Anthropology Dream research

Arnold van Gennep described rites of passage as separation, a threshold (“liminal”) stage, and return. Doors and gates are where many cultures stage that middle step.

van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (1909)

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

Dreams that share its images