In the interpretation of dreams, Horse is among the recurring images that traditional dream-books and modern depth psychology have alike tried to read. It is commonly interpreted as power, freedom, drive, and untamed vital energy.
Common readings
The horse is a classic image of powerful natural energy and drive; whether it is ridden, wild or harnessed is read as the dreamer's relation to that force.
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.
Horses recur as a coded category in Hall and Van de Castle's content-analysis system, and Freud, in The Interpretation of Dreams, discusses horses among the animals he reads as occasional disguised stand-ins for instinctual or sexual energy, a specific and attributed claim rather than a general rule he applies to every animal dream alike. The folk gloss of a horse as freedom or untamed power draws on the animal's long cultural role, from its historical importance in warfare and transport to its frequent appearance as a symbol of vitality across unrelated mythologies, including the winged horses and solar chariot-horses of Greek and Vedic myth respectively, associations carried into modern dream-symbol dictionaries without the attribution their scholarly sources would require.