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Dream Meaning

Dreams of Horses: Jung's Archetype, the Mabinogion Rhiannon Dream, and Vedic Aśvamedha Context

Dreams of horses: Jung's archetypal life-force reading, Rhiannon's Mabinogion dream-vision, and the Vedic Aśvamedha dream-precedent.

Published

Oil painting of mares and foals by George Stubbs, circa 1762.
Mares and Foals by George Stubbs (c. 1762). Horse dreams are the single most-discussed animal dream in Western depth psychology: in Jung's Symbols of Transformation (CW 5), the horse represents the mother-complex, libido, and the energy of transformation; a recurring running-horse dream in Sigmund Freud's Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1910) is the first published psychoanalytic dream-horse interpretation. George Stubbs (c. 1762). Calouste Gulbenkian Museum. Photograph by Pedro Ribeiro Simões, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Horse dreams in Jung's analytical psychology represent life-force, instinct, and sometimes the mother-imago-in-motion. The Mabinogion's Rhiannon visionary-dream imagery is one of the oldest Welsh literary horse-dream precedents. Vedic sources (Shatapatha Brahmana 13) treat the royal Aśvamedha context as dream-divination-adjacent. See our horse spirit-animal page.

Dreams of horses: Jung + Rhiannon. See our horse page.

Frequently asked

What does it mean to dream of a horse?
Jung: life-force, instinct, mother-imago-in-motion. Mabinogion Rhiannon precedent. See our horse spirit-animal page.

Sources

  1. PEER-REVIEWEDC.G. Jung, Archetypes — Princeton, 1959.
  2. PRIMARYThe Mabinogion (Branch 1, Rhiannon) — Davies trans., Oxford, 2007.
  3. REFERENCEOur horse spirit-animal page