DREAM GALAXY

Images · Animals

Dreams about bird: Jung, traditions and semiotics

This is not a dream dictionary. Each perspective below names where it comes from; traditions are shown side by side, not merged into one meaning.

Start with yourself

What was the bird doing — flying off, landing near you, singing? Did it seem to bring something?

Jung · Two levels of reading

There is no specific Jungian note for this image; this is his general method.

Jung suggested reading a dream image first on the “objective level” (the Bird as the real thing in your life), then on the “subjective level” (the Bird as a part of you). He also warned against fixed dream dictionaries: the same image means different things for different dreamers.

If the Bird were a part of you, which part would it be?

C. G. Jung, Collected Works 7 & 8; “Approaching the Unconscious”, in Man and His Symbols (1964)

Traditions, side by side

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

Semiotics: how an image comes to mean

Following C. S. Peirce, an image can work as a sign in three ways:

C. S. Peirce, Collected Papers 2.247–249 (icon, index, symbol)
C. G. Jung, Psychological Types (1921), “Definitions: Symbol” — a sign stands for something known, a symbol for something not yet fully known
Ellis (1911), ch. II, on verbal links between dream images

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

Recorded dreams with bird