Anecdote collection · Animals
Wolves brought a lion without claws
Messenia, Greece · c. 7th c. BCE (as told)
The night before this maiden had had a dream. Some wolves (she dreamed) brought a lion to the farm bound and without claws, and she freed the lion from its bonds and got it claws, and then the wolves were torn in pieces by it.
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- Source
- Pausanias’ Description of Greece (Shilleto trans.) — Pausanias; trans. A. R. Shilleto, c. 150 / 1886 (trans.). Book IV, ch. 19
- Record type
- Anecdote collection
- Place
- Messenia, Greece · Ancient Greek
- Date
- c. 7th c. BCE (as told)
- Uncertainty
- High — From Pausanias’ Description of Greece (A. R. Shilleto trans., 1886); a local tradition recorded by a 2nd-century traveller.
- Imagery
- Animals · Dog · War
- Feelings
- Fear · Relief
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
War
In the war, were you a soldier, someone fleeing, or watching from outside? Was there a particular enemy?
Homeric epic Classical text
Zeus sends Agamemnon a deliberately false dream promising that Troy will fall at once. The epic itself treats a war dream as something that can mislead.
Homer, Iliad II
Song-dynasty poetry Literature
Lu You and Xin Qiji, both kept from the frontier they longed to recover, kept dreaming of battle; their war dreams are read today as poems of unfulfilled duty.
Lu You; Xin Qiji
Exploration notes, not a diagnosis, a prediction, or evidence of real events.
Dreams that share its images
- A barking dog with a human voice Athens, Greece · 450 BCE
- A basket of cold squirming snakes England · before 1911
- A long green dog from the south Liangzhou (Wuwei), China · 376 (as told)
- Carried up out of a well Chang’an, China · c. 750
- A spirit passed before my face Land of Uz · undated narrative
- Bears and snakes in an auspicious dream Western Zhou, China · c. 9th–8th century BCE