Diary & poem of record · Animals
Animals bound in an underground laboratory
Underground laboratory · 2 February 1880
I dreamed that I found myself underground in a vault artificially lighted. Tables were ranged along the walls of the vault, and upon these tables were bound down the living bodies of half-dissected and mutilated animals. Scientific experts were busy at work on their victims with scalpel, hot iron and forceps. But, as I looked at the creatures lying bound before them, they no longer appeared to be mere rabbits, or hounds, for in each I saw a human shape, the shape of a man, with limbs and lineaments resembling those of their torturers, hidden within the outward form.
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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, XIV. The Laboratory Underground
- Record type
- Diary & poem of record
- Place
- Underground laboratory · British
- Date
- 2 February 1880
- Uncertainty
- Low — Dated first-person diary dream reflecting Kingsford's historical anti-vivisection advocacy.
- Imagery
- Animals · Machine · Faces
- Feelings
- Horror · 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.
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
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
Exploration notes, not a diagnosis, a prediction, or evidence of real events.
Dreams that share its images
- The dog in the old mangle England · before 1911
- The blank canvas in the haunted house Continental European town, unspecified · c. 1885–1886 (diary sequence)
- Father, don’t you see that I am burning? Central Europe · before 1900
- A masked man asked for his bone back Huangkeng, China · c. 795
- The white horse at dawn Tokyo, Japan · 1908
- Who is dead in the White House? Washington, D.C., USA · early April 1865 (as reported)