Dreams about time: 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
Did time in the dream run fast, slow, or stop? Were you late for something, or waiting?
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 Time as the real thing in your life), then on the “subjective level” (the Time as a part of you). He also warned against fixed dream dictionaries: the same image means different things for different dreamers.
If the Time 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
Early dream research Dream research
Ellis devoted part of a chapter to the “apparent rapidity” of dreams and the odd sense of time in them, arguing that a dream often feels long because it is remembered like a described picture.
Havelock Ellis, The World of Dreams (1911), ch. IX
Nineteenth-century case Dream research
Alfred Maury reported dreaming a long drama of the French Revolution ending at the guillotine, and waking as the bed’s headboard fell on his neck. Freud and others debated how so much could fit into a moment.
Alfred Maury, Le Sommeil et les rêves (1861); discussed in Freud (1900), ch. I
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 time look like one you have actually seen? Could it simply be a copy of a memory? - Index — by connection
Could the time point to an actual cause — a bodily sensation, a sound in the room, something that happened that day? - Symbol — by convention
Does the time 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 time
- Dreaming within a dream State of Song, China · c. 4th–3rd century BCE
- A balance exactly poised Rome, Italy · c. 70–79 CE
- The waking body disappears in sleep India · c. 6th–10th c. (text)
- The millet was not yet cooked Handan, China (story setting) · c. 780
- The kingdom under the locust tree Guangling (Yangzhou), China · c. 802
- Looking down at nine wisps of smoke Tang China · c. 810
- She dreamt of her uncle and foretold her death London, England · January 1664 (as told to Pepys)
- Buried a thousand years in stone Grasmere, England · c. 1817–1819
- A living globe made of drops Russia · 1869 (novel)
- Carving the guardian out of the wood Tokyo, Japan · 1908
- A samurai racing the temple clock to enlightenment Tokyo, Japan · 1908
- Charged one franc of interest Zurich, Switzerland · c. 1914