DREAM GALAXY

Memoir · People & kin

Chased round the stove by the devil

Mission school, Wabash, Indiana · c. 1884–87

Then I ran round and round the stove, crying aloud for help. But my mother and the woman seemed not to know my danger. They sat still, looking quietly upon the devil’s chase after me. At last I grew dizzy. My head revolved as on a hidden pivot.

Original text — American Indian Stories, Zitkala-Ša (Gertrude Simmons Bonnin)

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Source
American Indian Stories — Zitkala-Ša (Gertrude Simmons Bonnin), 1921. The School Days of an Indian Girl, “The Devil”
Rights
Public domain (US)
Record type
Memoir
Place
Mission school, Wabash, Indiana · Native American, Dakota
Date
c. 1884–87
Uncertainty
Low — From Zitkala-Ša (Gertrude Simmons Bonnin), Yankton Dakota writer and activist, American Indian Stories (1921). She dreamed this after a missionary teacher showed the children a picture of the devil.
Imagery
A stranger · Mother · House · Child
Feelings
Fear · Horror · Loneliness

Another way to look at this dream

Notes on the images in this dream from psychology, myth, folklore and semiotics. Each names its source.

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 →

Mother

Was this your own mother as you know her, or someone in her place? What did she do or say?

Jung · The mother archetype

Jung first reads a dreamed mother on the “objective level” — your real mother and your relationship. Only then on the “subjective level”: the mother archetype, which he described as both nourishing and devouring.

C. G. Jung, “Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype”, Collected Works 9i

Early dream research & psychology Dream research

Family members, friends and strangers populate most dreams. Freud read many such dreams as wishes in disguise; contemporary researchers emphasise continuity with waking relationships and concerns.

Freud, Dream Psychology (1920)

Myth & scripture (several traditions) Myth & scripture

Dreams in epic and scripture are often addressed to someone — a wife waiting for a husband, a son receiving a vision for his family — and are told aloud to be understood.

Odyssey XIX; Genesis 37

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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

All perspectives on house →

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

Dreams that share its images