Wolf

In the interpretation of dreams, Wolf is among the recurring images that traditional dream-books and modern depth psychology have alike tried to read. It is commonly interpreted as instinct, the wild, threat, and the shadow of the psyche.

Common readings

The wolf is read now as raw instinct and the wild, now as a threat, and in Jungian terms often as a figure of the shadow, the disowned side 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.

What changes the reading

Interpreters weigh the wolf's behaviour against the dreamer's response. A wolf watching from the treeline, a pack circling, an outright attack and a wolf that walks beside the dreamer are four different dreams, and fear met with flight reads differently from fear met with stillness. The lone wolf and the pack carry distinct senses, solitude and threat in company respectively. Where the wolf speaks or leads, older folk registers of the guide animal are usually allowed to soften the plain reading of danger.

The most scrutinised dream in the history of psychoanalysis has wolves in it. Freud's patient Sergei Pankejeff, the Wolf Man of the 1918 case history, dreamed as a small child that his bedroom window opened by itself onto a walnut tree full of white wolves, six or seven of them, motionless, staring at him; he woke in terror of being eaten. Freud built the case's whole reconstruction on that dream, and the analytic literature has argued about it ever since, Pankejeff himself, interviewed in old age, remaining unconvinced. The dream is cited here as history, not as a warrant for any reading of wolves.

The wolf came to that bedroom window already loaded. The fairy tales had made it the devourer at the door, in Red Riding Hood and the Seven Little Kids; the werewolf tradition made it what a person becomes when the human slips; Norse myth set Fenrir to swallow Odin at the world's end, while Rome, characteristically, kept a she wolf as foster mother of its founders. Threat and wildness on one side, fierce nurture on the other.

The interpretive traditions sort dream wolves along that split. The Jungian line reads the wolf toward the instinctual shadow, what is hungry and unhoused in the dreamer, threatening chiefly when starved or denied; folk dictionaries read wolves toward enemies and hard seasons. The dream's own detail, pack or lone wolf, attack or watchfulness, decides which register interpreters reach for.