Dreams about father: 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

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.

Which voice in your head sounds most like the father in this dream?

C. G. Jung, “On the Psychology of the Unconscious”, Collected Works 7

Traditions, side by side

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

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

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 father

The dead king advises his son Egypt · c. 1950 BCE (Middle Kingdom)
A thunderbolt fell on my father’s house Mesopotamia · 401 BCE
My father sinking into a lake of mire Ayodhya (setting) · c. 5th–4th c. BCE (epic)
His son with thunder and a sceptre Thrace · c. 60 BCE
Two ghosts plotting to enter my father Taiyuan, China · Tang (undated)
Back in the little town of his birth Russia · 1866 (novel)
Last night I dreamt we were at Simony Hut Aussee, Austria · summer 1896
Father, don’t you see that I am burning? Central Europe · before 1900
A mother praying for a father who never returns Tokyo, Japan · 1908
A fire in a hotel in a strange city Zurich, Switzerland · c. 1913
A cedar chest of dream-stuff from her grandfather Washington, D.C. · c. 1910s