DREAM GALAXY

Anecdote collection · People & kin

The rudder was forced from him

Rome, Italy · c. 59–68 CE

He had never been used to dream before the murder of his mother. After that event, he fancied in his sleep that he was steering a ship, and that the rudder was forced from him: that he was dragged by his wife Octavia into a prodigiously dark place; and was at one time covered over with a vast swarm of winged ants

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.). Nero, ch. XLVI
Rights
Public domain (author died 100+ years ago)
Record type
Anecdote collection
Place
Rome, Italy · Roman
Date
c. 59–68 CE
Uncertainty
High — From Suetonius’ Lives of the Twelve Caesars (A. Thomson trans., rev. T. Forester); an omen-dream reported by a Roman biographer.
Imagery
Boat · Darkness · Insects · Partner · Mother
Feelings
Horror · Unease

Another way to look at this dream

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

Boat

Were you steering, a passenger, or simply being carried? Did you know where the boat was going?

Jung · The night sea journey

Borrowing the ethnologist Frobenius’s phrase, Jung wrote about the “night sea journey”: a hero swallowed by the sea or a monster who travels in the dark and comes out changed.

C. G. Jung, “Symbols of Transformation”, Collected Works 5

Ancient Egypt Myth & scripture

Egyptian funerary books such as the Amduat describe the sun god sailing a barque through the twelve hours of the night before rising again at dawn.

Amduat (New Kingdom)

Daoist thought Philosophy

The Zhuangzi praises one who wanders “like an unmoored boat” — drifting here is ease, not loss of control.

Zhuangzi, “Lie Yukou”

All perspectives on boat →

Darkness

What could you not see in the dark — and did it feel like something could see you?

Jung · Nigredo

Jung borrowed the alchemists’ word nigredo, “blackening”, for the dark first stage of a transformation — a time of confusion that comes before anything clarifies.

C. G. Jung, “Psychology and Alchemy”, Collected Works 12

Greek myth Myth & scripture

In Hesiod’s family tree of the gods, Night (Nyx) is the mother of Sleep (Hypnos) and of the tribe of Dreams. Darkness here is where dreams come from.

Hesiod, Theogony 211–212

All perspectives on darkness →

Insects

Were the insects many or one, busy or still? Did you feel small among them, or large?

Tang tale Literature

The whole kingdom of “The Governor of Nanke” turns out to be an ants’ nest. Its glory and grief were real to the dreamer, and tiny to the waking eye.

Li Gongzuo, “The Governor of Nanke” (c. 802)

All perspectives on insects →

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

Dreams that share its images