Dog

In the interpretation of dreams, Dog is among the recurring images that traditional dream-books and modern depth psychology have alike tried to read. It is commonly interpreted as loyalty, friendship, protection, and instinctual fidelity.

Common readings

The dog is generally read as a figure of loyalty and friendship, a protector, or a faithful instinctual part of the self.

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.

As with other animal dream content, dogs are a documented category in Hall and Van de Castle's content-analysis system, which counts their recurrence across large samples of ordinary reported dreams without assigning fixed meaning. The folk reading of a dog as loyalty and friendship draws on the animal's long domesticated relationship with humans and its symbolic role across numerous unrelated cultures, from psychopomp figures guiding the dead in ancient Egyptian and Mesoamerican belief to the companionable house-dog of modern Western life, but this is a cultural association carried into the dream-symbol genre rather than a finding specific to dream research about what a dog in a dream signifies for the person who dreamed it.

The dog's oldest mythological employment is at the border of death. Anubis, the jackal headed guide who weighs hearts; the dogs of Hecate at the crossroads; Cerberus at the gate of Hades; the dogs of Yama in the Vedas: across traditions the canine keeps or crosses the threshold between worlds, which folklorists connect to the dog's real work at the boundary of camp and wild. Folk belief kept the association domestic, in the widespread omen that a dog howling by night foretells a death, and the graveyard black dog of British lore. A dream dog stands in that lineage as well as at the foot of the bed.

Against the psychopomp stands the companion. The dog is the first domesticated animal, and its dream conventions are correspondingly warm: loyalty, protection, friendship without conditions, the folk dictionaries reading a friendly dream dog toward faithful friends and a snarling one toward friendship soured. The Jungian tradition reads the dog as instinct on good terms with the dreamer, the animal nature that serves and warns rather than threatens, with the hostile or rabid dream dog as that relation gone wrong.

Interpreters weigh the dreamer's own history with dogs first, love or bite, before any symbolism, and then the dream dog's behaviour, guiding, guarding, following or barring the way. That last office, the older traditions would note, was always the dog's proper work.