DREAM GALAXY

Anecdote collection · Cities & buildings

Fortune waiting weary at the door

Rome, Italy · c. 15 BCE

he dreamt that the goddess Fortune said to him, “I stand before your door weary; and unless I am speedily admitted, I shall fall into the hands of the first who comes to seize me.” On his awaking, when the door of the house was opened, he found a brazen statue of the goddess, above a cubit long, close to the threshold

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.). Galba, ch. IV
Rights
Public domain (author died 100+ years ago)
Record type
Anecdote collection
Place
Rome, Italy · Roman
Date
c. 15 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
Gate · House · A stranger
Feelings
Wonder · Joy

Another way to look at this dream

Notes on the images in this dream from psychology, myth, folklore and semiotics. Each names its source.

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)

All perspectives on gate →

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

All perspectives on house →

A stranger

Did the stranger remind you of anyone, even slightly? What did they want from you?

Jung · Shadow, anima and animus

Jung read unknown figures as possible parts of the dreamer: a same-sex stranger may carry the shadow; an other-sex figure what he called the anima or animus. These are offered as lenses, not labels — and his gender framing reflects his time.

C. G. Jung, “Aion, ch. 2–3”, Collected Works 9ii

Homeric epic Classical text

In Homer, gods and dreams arrive in borrowed shapes: Athena visits Nausicaa disguised as her friend; Zeus sends a Dream to Agamemnon looking like Nestor.

Odyssey VI; Iliad II

All perspectives on a stranger →

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

Dreams that share its images