DREAM GALAXY

Images · Nature & weather

Dreams about mountain: 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 climbing it, looking at it, or already on top? What would reaching the summit mean to you?

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

If the Mountain 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

Japanese custom Folk saying

An Edo-period saying ranks the luckiest images for the first dream of the New Year (hatsuyume): “first Fuji, second a hawk, third an aubergine”.

Edo-period saying on hatsuyume

Chinese poetry Literature

Li Bai climbs Mount Tianmu in a dream, sees a whole immortal world open up, then wakes on his pillow — and decides not to bow to the powerful.

Li Bai, “Dreaming of Tianmu” (c. 745)

Comparative mythology Myth & scripture

Olympus in Greece and Kunlun in Chinese myth are both mountains where gods live — separate traditions that happen to place the sacred high up.

Greek myth; Classic of Mountains and Seas

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 mountain