Bird

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.

Divination by birds was a public institution before it was a dream convention. Roman augurs took the auspices, literally the bird watching, before acts of state, reading flight, cry and feeding; Greek seers read omens from eagles and herons, and the practice runs through Etruscan, Germanic and Arabian tradition alike. The bird as message bearer is equally old, doves returning to the ark with the olive leaf, Odin's ravens Huginn and Muninn flying out over the world each day and returning with news. When a dream dictionary reads a bird toward tidings, it is compressing that history.

The soul bird is the second great register: Egyptian art shows the ba, the personal soul, as a human headed bird leaving the body, and the bird released or escaping at death recurs in folk and religious imagery across cultures. Flight upward from the earthbound made birds the natural figure of spirit, aspiration and the part of a person that is not held down.

The psychological traditions inherit both registers. The Jungian line reads dream birds toward thoughts and the winged, transcendent function of the psyche, with the bird's kind setting the tone, raven and dove being nearly opposite dreams. The handbooks always read by species too, owls toward warning, doves toward peace, birds of prey toward power or threat, and modern interpreters keep the habit, weighing kind, flight and song before anything else.