DREAM GALAXY

Anecdote collection · Water

A rope of women’s hair

Erythrae, Ionia · archaic period (as told)

At last a native of Erythræ, who got his living from the sea by catching fish, but had lost his eyesight through some disease, Phormio by name, dreamed that the women of Erythræ were to cut off their hair, and that the men making a rope out of this hair were to drag the raft ashore.

Original text — Pausanias’ Description of Greece (Shilleto trans.), Pausanias; trans. A. R. Shilleto

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Source
Pausanias’ Description of Greece (Shilleto trans.) — Pausanias; trans. A. R. Shilleto, c. 150 / 1886 (trans.). Book VII, ch. 5
Rights
Public domain (author died 100+ years ago)
Record type
Anecdote collection
Place
Erythrae, Ionia · Ancient Greek
Date
archaic period (as told)
Uncertainty
High — From Pausanias’ Description of Greece (A. R. Shilleto trans., 1886); a local tradition recorded by a 2nd-century traveller.
Imagery
Boat · Sea · Crowd
Feelings
Longing · 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.

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”

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Water

Was the water clear or muddy, still or rising? Which water in your own life — a place, a swim, a flood — does it bring back first?

Jung · The unconscious

Jung called water the most common image for the unconscious: something deep, below the surface, that we can look into but not see through.

C. G. Jung, “Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious”, Collected Works 9i

Classical Chinese medicine Historical medicine

The Lingshu pairs dream images with the balance of yin and yang: when yin is excessive, one “dreams of wading through great water, and is afraid”. This is a historical theory about the body, not medical advice and not a way to diagnose anything.

Huangdi Neijing, Lingshu ch. 43 “Yinxie Fameng”

Hebrew Bible; Babylonian myth Myth & scripture

Several creation stories begin with primordial water — “darkness was upon the face of the deep” in Genesis, the fresh-water Apsu in the Babylonian Enuma Elish. Here water is what exists before order.

Genesis 1:2; Enuma Elish I

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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

All perspectives on a stranger →

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

Dreams that share its images