Dreams about butterfly: 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

Were you watching the butterfly, or were you the butterfly? What did it feel like to wake?

Jung · Rebirth

Jung wrote about many forms of “rebirth” — renewal, transformation of personality — as an experience people describe across cultures, without claiming one meaning for them all.

Is there a version of you that has been in a chrysalis for a while?

C. G. Jung, “Concerning Rebirth”, Collected Works 9i

Traditions, side by side

Daoist thought Philosophy

Zhuangzi dreams he is a butterfly, wakes, and cannot tell whether he is Zhou who dreamed of a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming of being Zhou — he calls this “the transformation of things”.

Zhuangzi, “Qiwulun”

Semiotics: how an image comes to mean

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

Icon — by resemblance
Does the butterfly look like one you have actually seen? Could it simply be a copy of a memory?
Index — by connection
Could the butterfly point to an actual cause — a bodily sensation, a sound in the room, something that happened that day?
Symbol — by convention
Does the butterfly mean what it means by convention — an idiom, a saying, a family phrase? Would it still mean that in another language or culture?

An example

Greek vocabulary Classical text

In ancient Greek, psychē meant both “soul” and “butterfly”. The link between the two lives in the language itself.

Liddell–Scott Greek Lexicon, s.v. ψυχή

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 butterfly

Zhuang Zhou dreams he is a butterfly State of Song, China · c. 4th–3rd century BCE