Cave

In the interpretation of dreams, Cave is among the recurring images that traditional dream-books and modern depth psychology have alike tried to read. It is commonly interpreted as the hidden depths of the psyche, retreat, or buried truth.

Common readings

The cave is read as a descent into the hidden or the buried, a place of retreat, of the unconscious, or of a truth that has been kept out of sight.

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.

Caves recur as initiation and revelation sites across unrelated religious traditions independently of any dream context, from the cave settings of early Christian and Buddhist monastic asceticism to Plato's own cave allegory in the Republic, used there as a philosophical image of ignorance and enlightenment rather than as a dream report. Jungian interpretation reads a dreamed cave, when it appears, as an image of the unconscious itself or of the womb, a specifically Jungian gloss built on the cave's enclosed, interior character. As with other dream-symbol entries here, these are named, attributed interpretive positions from religious history and from a particular twentieth-century psychological theory, not a demonstrated universal meaning for cave imagery in dreams generally.

Antiquity did not merely interpret dreams of caves; it went into caves to dream. Incubation, sleeping in a sanctuary to receive a healing or prophetic dream, was organised practice in the Greek world, and the darker oracles took the descent literally: at the cave of Trophonius in Boeotia the inquirer went down into the earth by night through a narrow opening and came back with what was shown, shaken enough that proverb said those who consulted Trophonius forgot how to smile. The cave was the architecture of revelation, the place where the daylight self is set aside.

Religious history kept faith with the shape. Muhammad received the first revelation of the Quran in the cave of Hira; Elijah heard the still small voice at the cave on Horeb; the hermits of several traditions chose caves as the fit setting for vision. Plato's cave in the Republic runs the image the other way, the cave as ordinary unenlightened life, which only shows how strong the figure is, since even its reversal kept the terms.

The psychological traditions read the dream cave in the incubatory spirit: the Jungian school takes descent into the earth as entry into the unconscious, the cave as the chamber where what is buried, treasure or fear, is kept, and the return to daylight as the point of the journey. Popular dictionaries compress this to hidden depths and retreat. The readings are the traditions' own; the cave's credentials as a place of disclosure are historical fact.