The bear may be the oldest object of human religious attention. Circumpolar peoples from Scandinavia through Siberia to the Ainu of Japan kept bear ceremonies into modern times, killing and mourning the animal as an honoured guest sent back to its country, and cave arrangements of bear skulls have been argued, cautiously, as far older cult. The bear's human way of standing, its omnivorous appetite and above all its winter disappearance and spring return made it everywhere a creature of death and resurrection, and the she bear with cubs the very type of ferocious motherhood, a sense scripture uses without explanation.
The old handbooks read dream bears toward formidable persons and dangers, with the animal's size and temper deciding how the encounter would go. The folk registers kept the mother sense and the warning sense side by side.
The modern psychological reading leans on the hibernation: the bear as strength withdrawn into itself, the introspective season from which the animal returns renewed, an image the Jungian tradition reads toward the psyche's own winters, and popular dictionaries compress into introspection and protective power. That compression is recent and should be read as such, but the material it compresses, the returning bear of the northern cults, is among the oldest religious symbolism there is, which gives the dream bear a longer pedigree than almost anything else a sleeper meets.