Snake

The snake has more attested dream readings than almost any other image, and they have very little in common, which is itself the most useful thing to know about it.

The Babylonian Talmud, in the dream material of tractate Berakhot, gives an interpretation that no modern dictionary would predict. One who sees a snake in a dream has his livelihood readily available to him. If the snake bites him, his livelihood is doubled. If he kills the snake, he loses his livelihood. The logic runs through wordplay and association rather than through anything resembling emotional symbolism, and the outcome is economic.

Artemidorus distinguishes between kinds. The great serpent, the drakon, he associates with kingship, with time, and with wealth, on the grounds of its age, its guarding of hoards, and its association with certain gods. Ordinary snakes he reads as illness or as an enemy, and their behaviour in the dream governs the reading, what the snake does to the dreamer matters more than the fact of its presence.

Neither of these is about transformation, and neither is about the self.

The reading of the snake as a symbol of transformation because it sheds its skin is a genuine and old association in iconography, it lies behind the healing serpents of Asclepius and a good deal else, but that is a fact about how snakes were depicted and thought about while awake, not a documented tradition of reading them in dreams.

The two twentieth-century readings are attributable, mutually incompatible, and both routinely presented without names.

Freud placed the snake among the symbols standing for the male genitals, a reading he considered so evident that he spent little effort defending it. It is part of his general position that the manifest content of a dream disguises a latent wish, and that a limited stock of symbols does the disguising. Whether one accepts the theory or not, the reading is his and rests on his argument.

Jung rejected precisely that approach. He argued against fixed symbol dictionaries repeatedly, insisting that the same image means different things for different dreamers and that the interpreter must work by amplification and by attention to the individual's situation. His own reading of the serpent, as an image of the instinctual psyche, of what is coldblooded and other within a person, and of dangerous transformative energy rising from below, is a proposal within that framework, not a lookup table entry.

Kundalini as a coiled serpent at the base of the spine is a real doctrine of Indian tantric physiology, and it is not a theory of dreams. Importing it into a dream dictionary entry, as is now standard, is a category transfer performed without acknowledgement.

The result is that the modern entry, transformation, healing, hidden threat, awakening life force, is a composite assembled from four traditions that disagree with one another, presented as though it were a single ancient consensus. The honest version lists the readings, names the holders, and notes that they cannot all be right.