DREAM GALAXY

Images · People & kin

Dreams about partner: 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

Was it your partner now, someone from the past, or someone you have never met? Was the distance between you the same as when you are awake?

Jung · Anima and animus — after the real person

Jung would first read a dreamed partner as your actual partner and relationship. Only then might the figure carry what he called the anima or animus — an inner image of the other — a framing that reflects his era’s ideas about gender.

Was the partner in the dream more like the real person, or more like someone you wish for?

C. G. Jung, “The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious, “Anima and Animus””, Collected Works 7

Traditions, side by side

Homeric epic Classical text

After twenty years apart, Penelope tells how a likeness of Odysseus lay beside her that night, “such as he was when he went with the host”, and how she took it for real.

Homer, Odyssey XX

Han-dynasty poetry Literature

In one of the Nineteen Old Poems, a wife sleeping alone through the long nights dreams she sees her husband’s face, and he comes for her in a carriage — then is gone.

Nineteen Old Poems, “Cold, cold, the year draws to its end”

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 partner