Sun

In the interpretation of dreams, Sun is among the recurring images that traditional dream-books and modern depth psychology have alike tried to read. It is commonly interpreted as consciousness, vitality, the self, clarity, and success.

Common readings

The sun is generally read as consciousness, vitality and the clear light of day, and as an emblem of the integrated self and of success.

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.

Solar imagery carries an unusually dense weight of attributed meaning outside dreams specifically, from sun-deity worship across numerous unrelated ancient religions to Jung's own use of the sun as a recurring image of the Self, the archetype of psychic wholeness and integration, discussed at length in his later writing on alchemical and mandala symbolism. A dreamed sun inherits this broader cultural and psychological weight rather than carrying one settled meaning of its own within dream interpretation specifically. Artemidorus, characteristically, resists any single reading: he treats a dreamed sun's significance as dependent on the dreamer's own status and on the sun's apparent condition, whether bright, obscured or unusually positioned, in the dream itself.

When Joseph dreams in Genesis of sun, moon and stars bowing to him, his father instantly reads the sun as himself: the equivalence of sun with father and king was already proverbial in the ancient Near East, where kings took the sun as title and emblem, and the Greek dream handbooks worked the same rule, reading the heavenly bodies as the powers over the dreamer's life and the sun as the greatest of them. A rising, shining or darkened dream sun was read as the fortune of the father, the patron or the throne.

Religious history gave the sun a second identity as the image of divinity itself, from Ra and Shamash through Apollo to the sun metaphors that Christianity applied to Christ, and philosophy followed, Plato making the sun the visible stand in for the Good. The alchemists sealed the inheritance for the modern psychologies by making sol the gold making principle, the conscious, formative, kingly pole of the work.

Jung took the alchemical sun over explicitly: in his tradition the sun is consciousness itself, the ego's daylight, the hero whose nightly descent and dawn return is the oldest pattern of renewal, and a dream sun's condition, brilliant, clouded or black, is read as a report on the dreamer's conscious standing. The black sun of the alchemists, sol niger, serves that school as the image of consciousness eclipsed. Popular dictionaries compress the lot to vitality and success; the lineage behind the compression is the point of this entry.