Dreams about shadow: 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
Whose shadow was it? If it could speak, what would it say that you would rather not hear?
Jung · The shadow
Jung’s “shadow” is the part of ourselves we do not acknowledge. In dreams it often appears as a figure who does what we would never do. Meeting it is uncomfortable, and also how it stops running things from behind.
What did the shadowy figure do that you would never do? Is there anything in it you might, a little, want?
C. G. Jung, “Aion, ch. 2 “The Shadow””, Collected Works 9ii
Traditions, side by side
Greek philosophy Philosophy
In Plato’s cave, prisoners take shadows on the wall for reality. Shadow there is about knowledge: what we mistake for the real thing.
Plato, Republic VII
Daoist thought Philosophy
In the Zhuangzi, the penumbra asks the shadow why it keeps moving and stopping; the shadow answers that it depends on something else, which depends on something else again.
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 shadow look like one you have actually seen? Could it simply be a copy of a memory? - Index — by connection
Could the shadow point to an actual cause — a bodily sensation, a sound in the room, something that happened that day? - Symbol — by convention
Does the shadow 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 shadow
- As in a mirror, as in a dream Ancient India · c. 5th c. BCE (text)
- My own vast shadow England (countryside) · before 1911