Religious narrative · Animals
Rams speckled and grisled
Haran, Mesopotamia · undated narrative
mine eyes, and saw in a dream, and, behold, the rams which leaped upon the cattle were ringstraked, speckled, and grisled.
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- Source
- The Bible, King James Version — Various, 1611. Genesis 31:10
- Record type
- Religious narrative
- Place
- Haran, Mesopotamia · Hebrew Bible
- Date
- undated narrative
- Uncertainty
- High — Religious narrative; not a historical dream report.
- Imagery
- Animals
- Feelings
- Wonder
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
- A conversation with a cat England · before 1911
- Planting fowls’ heads to grow chickens England · before 1911
- Bears and snakes in an auspicious dream Western Zhou, China · c. 9th–8th century BCE
- Oh, I’ve had such a curious dream! Oxford, England · 1865 (novel)
- I gave birth to a lion Athens, Greece · c. 495 BCE
- The great fish with a hook in its mouth Chang’an, China · c. 120 BCE (as told)