Memoir · People & kin
A cedar chest of dream-stuff from her grandfather
Washington, D.C. · c. 1910s
The gift was a fantastic thing, of texture far more delicate than a spider’s filmy web. It was a vision! A picture of an Indian camp, not painted on canvas nor yet written. It was dream-stuff, suspended in the thin air, filling the inclosure of the cedar wood container.
Open this dream in the galaxy →
- Source
- American Indian Stories — Zitkala-Ša (Gertrude Simmons Bonnin), 1921. A Dream of Her Grandfather
- Rights
- Public domain (US)
- Record type
- Memoir
- Place
- Washington, D.C. · Native American, Dakota
- Date
- c. 1910s
- Uncertainty
- Moderate — From Zitkala-Ša (Gertrude Simmons Bonnin), Yankton Dakota writer and activist, American Indian Stories (1921).
- Imagery
- Father · House · Crowd · Light
- Feelings
- Wonder · Nostalgia · Longing
Another way to look at this dream
Notes on the images in this dream from psychology, myth, folklore and semiotics. Each names its source.
Father
Was this your own father as you know him, or a father-like figure? Was there something unsaid between you?
Jung · Objective and subjective level
Jung suggested reading a dream figure twice: as the actual person, and as part of yourself. A dreamed father may be about him — or about your own sense of authority.
C. G. Jung, “On the Psychology of the Unconscious”, Collected Works 7
Confucian classics Classical text
Confucius, growing old, lamented that he had not dreamed of the Duke of Zhou — his model and spiritual forebear — for a long time.
Analects 7.5
Psychoanalysis Depth psychology
The night after his father’s funeral, Freud dreamed of a notice reading “You are requested to close the eyes” — a dream he connected to duty and self-reproach.
Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), ch. VI
House
Whose house was it — one you know, or one you only know in the dream? Which room did you spend the most time in?
Jung · The house as psyche
In 1909 Jung dreamed of a house whose cellar led down into older and older layers — Roman, then prehistoric. He later took it as an image of the psyche, with the oldest layers at the bottom.
C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962)
Phenomenology Philosophy
Gaston Bachelard argued that the house “shelters daydreaming”: the attic and cellar of a childhood home stay with us as places to imagine from.
Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (1958)
Chinese fiction Literature
In chapter 5 of Dream of the Red Chamber, Baoyu dreams his way into the Land of Illusion, a palace of cabinets holding registers of the household’s fates.
Cao Xueqin, Dream of the Red Chamber, ch. 5
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
Exploration notes, not a diagnosis, a prediction, or evidence of real events.
Dreams that share its images
- Living pictures in magnesium light Germany · before 1911
- Tiny sleep-spirits with war-clubs Great Lakes region · traditional (recorded c. 1820s–1850s)
- A procession coming down the hill Yamato Province, Japan · 1904 (retold folk tale)
- A hotel I could see into England · before 1911
- Riding the sky to the Southern Peak Yangzhou, China · c. 840
- Into the ants’ nest: the Hall of Watching Rain Xiayang, Shaanxi, China · undated (Jin collection)