Literary dream · Animals
A barking dog with a human voice
Athens, Greece · 450 BCE
It seemed to him that there was a furious bitch barking at him, and, mixed with the barking, a kind of human voice uttered these words
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- Source
- Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (Dryden trans., rev. Clough) — Plutarch; trans. John Dryden et al., rev. A. H. Clough, c. 100 / 1859 (revision). Life of Cimon
- Record type
- Literary dream
- Place
- Athens, Greece · Ancient Greek
- Date
- 450 BCE
- Uncertainty
- High — From Plutarch’s Lives (Dryden translation, revised by Clough); a reported dream.
- Imagery
- Dog · Animals
- Feelings
- Unease · Fear
How traditions have read this kind of dream
Psychological
Animals in dreams often speak, change form or carry strong feeling. Ellis suggested such dreams may lie behind fables of talking animals; later writers read them as instinct given a face.
Ellis (1911), note 262
Mythological
Messenger animals are everywhere in myth: the eagle in Penelope’s dream, Pharaoh’s seven cows, guardian dogs at the gates of the dead.
Odyssey XIX; Genesis 41
Chinese traditions
In the Liezi’s “deer under banana leaves”, a hunted deer becomes a puzzle about where dreaming ends; Zhuangzi’s butterfly turns the question inside out.
Liezi; Zhuangzi
These are cultural lenses, not a diagnosis.
Dreams that share its images
- No proper dog at all Scottish moorland (dreamed) · before 1888
- A long green dog from the south Liangzhou (Wuwei), China · 376 (as told)
- Three black dogs howling Wu (Suzhou), China · c. 475 BCE (as told)
- A scarlet insect as large as a lobster Southern Spain · before 1911
- A basket of cold squirming snakes England · before 1911
- A crab hidden in the ford Zurich, Switzerland · c. 1916