Horse

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.

The word nightmare contains no horse. The mare of the old term was a crushing spirit, the mara of Germanic folklore, that sat on the sleeper's chest by night, and the false association with horses came later by sound alone. The etymology matters to this entry because horse and night terror have been joined in the popular mind by a word that never meant to join them, and dream dictionaries still occasionally repeat the confusion as lore.

The horse's genuine symbolic employment is grander. It carried the sun across several mythologies, from the chariot of Helios to the horses of the Vedic Surya; Odin's eight legged Sleipnir bears his rider between worlds; the winged Pegasus springs from the Gorgon's blood and strikes the Muses' fountain from the rock. Power serving, and sometimes unseating, its rider is the constant, and the old handbooks read dream horses accordingly, by whether the animal is bridled, wild, ridden or thrown from.

Psychology kept the horse close. Freud's most famous child case, little Hans, turned on a boy's terror of horses, which the theory read as the father displaced, and the Jungian tradition reads the dream horse as the body and its vitality, the animal strength that carries the rider where consciousness directs, or bolts. Popular dictionaries compress the lot to freedom and drive. The readings are the traditions' own, and the state of the dream horse, willing, wild or lamed, is the detail all of them saddle first.