DREAM GALAXY

Images · Animals

Dreams about horse: 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 riding the horse, chasing it, or running from it? Did it go where you wanted?

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

If the Horse 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

Greek philosophy Philosophy

Plato pictures the soul as a charioteer driving two horses, one willing and one unruly — the self as something that has to be steered.

Plato, Phaedrus 246a–254e

Chinese poetry Literature

Xin Qiji, a general who no longer commands, dreams himself back among army camps and warhorses: horses as a life that has ended but still returns at night.

Xin Qiji, “Po Zhen Zi”

Semiotics: how an image comes to mean

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

An example

English etymology Classical text

The “mare” in nightmare is not a horse: it comes from Old English mære, a spirit that sat on sleepers’ chests. Fuseli’s painting The Nightmare (1781) added a horse anyway — a pun that later readers took as the meaning.

Oxford English Dictionary, “mare, n.1”; Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare (1781)

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 horse