Anecdote collection · Animals
A swan flew into his bosom
Athens, Greece · c. 408 BCE
Socrates, the night before Plato was going to be his pupil, dreamed that a swan flew into his bosom. Now the swan is a bird that has a fame for music
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- Source
- Pausanias’ Description of Greece (Shilleto trans.) — Pausanias; trans. A. R. Shilleto, c. 150 / 1886 (trans.). Book I, ch. 30
- Record type
- Anecdote collection
- Place
- Athens, Greece · Ancient Greek
- Date
- c. 408 BCE
- Uncertainty
- High — From Pausanias’ Description of Greece (A. R. Shilleto trans., 1886); a local tradition recorded by a 2nd-century traveller.
- Imagery
- Bird · Music
- Feelings
- Tenderness · Wonder
Another way to look at this dream
Notes on the images in this dream from psychology, myth, folklore and semiotics. Each names its source.
Bird
What was the bird doing — flying off, landing near you, singing? Did it seem to bring something?
Ancient Greece Classical text
Penelope dreams that an eagle kills her twenty geese, then speaks: it is Odysseus, come home to the suitors. The dream explains itself inside the dream.
Homer, Odyssey XIX
Japanese custom Folk saying
The hawk is the second of the three lucky images of the New Year’s first dream (“first Fuji, second a hawk…”).
Edo-period saying on hatsuyume
Exploration notes, not a diagnosis, a prediction, or evidence of real events.
Dreams that share its images
- Would the fall never come to an end? Oxford, England · 1865 (novel)
- Step in my tracks, up through the clouds Shores of Lake Huron · traditional (recorded c. 1820s–1850s)
- A snake became an eagle and carried me off Asia Minor · c. 470 BCE
- My dream-soul returned to the Lord of Heaven Southern Song China · c. 1130
- Riding the sky to the Southern Peak Yangzhou, China · c. 840
- An orchestra of birdsong England · before 1911