Anecdote collection · Death & the departed
Like the bronze skeleton at Delphi
Delphi, Phocis · 351 BCE
Among the votive offerings of Apollo was an imitation in brass of an old man, with his flesh already wasted away and his bones only left. It was said by the Delphians to have been a votive offering given by Hippocrates the doctor. Phayllus dreamt that he was like this old man, and forthwith a wasting disease came upon him, and fulfilled the dream.
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- Source
- Pausanias’ Description of Greece (Shilleto trans.) — Pausanias; trans. A. R. Shilleto, c. 150 / 1886 (trans.). Book X, ch. 2
- Record type
- Anecdote collection
- Place
- Delphi, Phocis · Ancient Greek
- Date
- 351 BCE
- Uncertainty
- High — From Pausanias’ Description of Greece (A. R. Shilleto trans., 1886); a local tradition recorded by a 2nd-century traveller.
- Imagery
- The dead · Temple · Mirror
- Feelings
- Unease · Horror
Another way to look at this dream
Notes on the images in this dream from psychology, myth, folklore and semiotics. Each names its source.
The dead
Who was it, and did they seem to know they had died? Was there something you were able to say, or not able to?
Jung · Objective level first
Jung’s memoir records his own dreams of his late father and treats them with seriousness rather than symbol-hunting: a dream of someone who has died is first about that person and that bond.
C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962)
Early dream research Dream research
Ellis devoted a chapter to dreams of the dead, noting how often the dead appear as if alive and how such dreams can bring comfort.
Havelock Ellis, The World of Dreams (1911), ch. VIII
Homeric epic Classical text
Achilles dreams of the dead Patroclus, who asks to be buried; Achilles reaches out to embrace him and grasps nothing.
Homer, Iliad XXIII
Mirror
What did the mirror show — you as you are, someone else, or nothing at all? How did you feel looking?
Jung · Meeting oneself
Jung wrote that whoever looks into the mirror of the water first sees their own face — the meeting with oneself, which he linked to the shadow, comes before anything deeper.
C. G. Jung, “Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious”, Collected Works 9i
Roman poetry Literature
Ovid’s Narcissus falls for a reflection in a pool without knowing it is himself.
Ovid, Metamorphoses III
Chinese fiction Literature
In Dream of the Red Chamber, the “Precious Mirror of Romance” shows a beauty on one side and a skeleton on the other; the man who keeps looking at the wrong side dies of it.
Cao Xueqin, Dream of the Red Chamber, ch. 12
Exploration notes, not a diagnosis, a prediction, or evidence of real events.
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