Dreams about insects: 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 the insects many or one, busy or still? Did you feel small among them, or large?
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 Insects as the real thing in your life), then on the “subjective level” (the Insects as a part of you). He also warned against fixed dream dictionaries: the same image means different things for different dreamers.
If the Insects 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
Tang tale Literature
The whole kingdom of “The Governor of Nanke” turns out to be an ants’ nest. Its glory and grief were real to the dreamer, and tiny to the waking eye.
Li Gongzuo, “The Governor of Nanke” (c. 802)
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 insects look like one you have actually seen? Could it simply be a copy of a memory? - Index — by connection
Could the insects point to an actual cause — a bodily sensation, a sound in the room, something that happened that day? - Symbol — by convention
Does the insects 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
Chinese idiom Literature
The story became the idiom nanke yi meng, “a dream of Nanke”, for any grand thing that turns out empty — an image that now means through the phrase rather than the insects.
Li Gongzuo, “The Governor of Nanke”
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 insects
- Zhuang Zhou dreams he is a butterfly State of Song, China · c. 4th–3rd century BCE
- The rudder was forced from him Rome, Italy · c. 59–68 CE
- Into the ants’ nest: the Hall of Watching Rain Xiayang, Shaanxi, China · undated (Jin collection)
- Fallen from the bed, eaten by worms Jinyang (Taiyuan), China · 617 (as told)
- The kingdom under the locust tree Guangling (Yangzhou), China · c. 802
- Woken from a dream a thousand li long Southern Song China · c. 1138
- Tiny sleep-spirits with war-clubs Great Lakes region · traditional (recorded c. 1820s–1850s)
- A procession coming down the hill Yamato Province, Japan · 1904 (retold folk tale)
- Evensong without light England · before 1911
- A scarlet insect as large as a lobster Southern Spain · before 1911