DREAM GALAXY

Diary & poem of record · Animals

The bird taken from its cage

Room, location unstated · c. 1877 (diary sequence)

I dreamt that I had a beautiful bird in a cage, and that the cage was placed on a table in a room where there was a cat. I took the bird out of the cage and put him on the table. Instantly the cat sprang upon … him and seized him in her mouth. I threw myself upon her and strove to wrest away her prey, loading her with reproaches and bewailing the fate of my beautiful bird.

Original text — Dreams and Dream-Stories, Part I: Dreams, Anna Bonus Kingsford; edited by Edward Maitland

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Source
Dreams and Dream-Stories, Part I: Dreams — Anna Bonus Kingsford; edited by Edward Maitland, posthumous edition; dreams recorded c. 1876–1887. Part I, V. The Bird and the Cat
Rights
Public domain (author died 100+ years ago)
Record type
Diary & poem of record
Place
Room, location unstated · British
Date
c. 1877 (diary sequence)
Uncertainty
Low — First-person diary dream; approximate year follows the chapter sequence and the editor's note linking it to the following 1877 dream.
Imagery
Bird · Cat · House
Feelings
Fear · 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.

Bird

What was the bird doing — flying off, landing near you, singing? Did it seem to bring something?

Ancient Greece Classical text

Penelope dreams that an eagle kills her twenty geese, then speaks: it is Odysseus, come home to the suitors. The dream explains itself inside the dream.

Homer, Odyssey XIX

Japanese custom Folk saying

The hawk is the second of the three lucky images of the New Year’s first dream (“first Fuji, second a hawk…”).

Edo-period saying on hatsuyume

All perspectives on bird →

Animals

What was the animal like — wild or tame, chasing you or keeping you company? Have you known an animal like it?

Jung · Instinct

In the Jungian book Man and His Symbols, animals in dreams are often read as instinct given a body — a part of us that is older than words.

Aniela Jaffé, “Symbolism in the Visual Arts”, in Man and His Symbols (1964)

Book of Songs Classical text

A Zhou-dynasty song records a dream reading: bears foretell sons, snakes foretell daughters. It shows how early animal dreams were read as signs about family.

Book of Songs, “Si Gan”

Hebrew Bible Myth & scripture

Pharaoh dreams of seven fat cows eaten by seven lean ones; Joseph reads them as years of plenty and famine — and says interpretation “belongs to God”, not to him.

Genesis 41; 40:8

All perspectives on animals →

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 →

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

Dreams that share its images