DREAM GALAXY

Images · Flight & sky

Dreams about sky: 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

What colour was the sky, and how far away? Were you under it, or up inside it?

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

If the Sky 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

Daoist classic Classical text

In the Liezi, King Mu of Zhou is carried up into a magician’s palace in the sky. He returns to find he never left his seat: “we were wandering in spirit,” the magician says — “why would the body move?”

Liezi, “King Mu of Zhou”

Roman philosophy Philosophy

In Cicero’s “Dream of Scipio”, the dreamer is taken up among the heavens and looks back at an Earth so small that Rome’s empire seems a speck.

Cicero, De re publica VI (“Dream of Scipio”)

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 sky