Memoir · Animals
No proper dog at all
Scottish moorland (dreamed) · before 1888
He looked down from the window upon a bare farmyard, that seemed to have been long disused. A great, uneasy stillness lay upon the world. There was no sign of the farm-folk or of any live stock, save for an old, brown, curly dog of the retriever breed… and yet the conviction came and grew upon the dreamer that this was no proper dog at all, but something hellish.
Open this dream in the galaxy →
- Source
- A Chapter on Dreams, in Across the Plains, with Other Memories and Essays — Robert Louis Stevenson, 1888 (essay) / 1892 (collection). A Chapter on Dreams
- Record type
- Memoir
- Place
- Scottish moorland (dreamed) · Scottish
- Date
- before 1888
- Uncertainty
- Low
- Imagery
- Dog · Animals · House
- Feelings
- Unease
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)
- Into the ants’ nest: the Hall of Watching Rain Xiayang, Shaanxi, China · undated (Jin collection)
- Three horses at one trough Luoyang (setting) · novel (printed 1522); set 220
- Easter morning, cattle on the graves Grasmere, England · c. 1819
- Already at the hospital, so no need to go Vienna, Austria · c. 1895
- Birds ate from the basket on my head Egypt (narrative setting) · undated narrative