Literary dream · Animals
Three horses at one trough
Luoyang (setting) · novel (printed 1522); set 220
操病勢轉加。忽一夜夢三馬同槽而食
Cao Cao’s illness grew worse. One night he suddenly dreamed of three horses eating at the same trough.
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- Source
- Romance of the Three Kingdoms, ch. 78 — Luo Guanzhong, 14th century; printed 1522
- Record type
- Literary dream
- Place
- Luoyang (setting) · Chinese
- Date
- novel (printed 1522); set 220
- Uncertainty
- Moderate — Romance of the Three Kingdoms; read as foreshadowing the Sima (司马, “horse”) family.
- Imagery
- Horse · Animals · Food · Ruler
- Feelings
- Unease · Confusion
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.
Dreams that share its images
- Three black dogs howling Wu (Suzhou), China · c. 475 BCE (as told)
- Birds ate from the basket on my head Egypt (narrative setting) · undated narrative
- Seven lean cows Egypt (narrative setting) · undated (text c. 6th c. BCE)
- A basket of cold squirming snakes England · before 1911
- The Dragon King begged the emperor for his life Chang’an (setting) · c. 1592 (novel); set 7th c.
- A parrot with both wings broken Luoyang, China · c. 698 (as told)