In the interpretation of dreams, Bird is among the recurring images that traditional dream-books and modern depth psychology have alike tried to read. It is commonly interpreted as freedom, the spirit, aspiration, and messages from beyond.
Common readings
Birds are read as images of the spirit and of aspiration, of freedom, and in many folk traditions as bearers of news or of messages.
The reading of dream symbols has a long documented history, from the Oneirocritica of Artemidorus in the second century to Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and the archetypal psychology of C. G. Jung. Such meanings are interpretive conventions of those traditions, offered here as ways the image has been understood rather than as fixed or established fact; in practice a symbol takes much of its sense from the individual dreamer and the setting of the dream.
Birds are a documented category in Hall and Van de Castle's content-analysis system, and flight and bird imagery appear together in Freud's own reading of flying dreams, which he associates with a wish for freedom or, in some passages of The Interpretation of Dreams, with sexual excitation, a specific attributed claim distinct from the generic folk reading of a bird as freedom, message or the soul's flight found across unrelated traditions, from the dove of the Hebrew Bible's flood narrative to the soul-birds of ancient Egyptian funerary belief, the ba, depicted as a human-headed bird. The range of these attributed sources across religion, psychoanalysis and empirical content-coding illustrates how differently the same dream image has been approached.