Dream Galaxy

Literary dream · Animals

The eagle and the twenty geese

Ithaca, ancient Greece · c. 8th century BCE

I have twenty geese about the house that eat mash out of a trough, and of which I am exceedingly fond. I dreamed that a great eagle came swooping down from a mountain, and dug his curved beak into the neck of each of them till he had killed them all. Presently he soared off into the sky… Then he came back again, and perching on a projecting rafter spoke to me with human voice, and told me to leave off crying.

Original text — The Odyssey, Book XIX (trans. Samuel Butler), Homer; translated by Samuel Butler

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Source
The Odyssey, Book XIX (trans. Samuel Butler) — Homer; translated by Samuel Butler, 1900 (translation). Book XIX
Rights
Public domain (author died 100+ years ago)
Record type
Literary dream
Place
Ithaca, ancient Greece · Ancient Greek
Date
c. 8th century BCE
Uncertainty
High — Epic poem; shown in Samuel Butler's public-domain English translation, not the Greek original.
Imagery
Bird · Animals · Mountain · Sky · Partner
Feelings
Grief · Longing

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.

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