Ibex in a dream: what does it mean?
A mountain goat that stands on near-vertical rock, and one subspecies of which became the first animal declared extinct twice.
How do the four traditions read it?
Each reading below comes from a named tradition and a cited source, so you can see where it came from and decide what fits your dream. The four often disagree, and that is the point: a symbol rarely means one fixed thing, and the distance between Freud, Jung, modern research and myth tells you more than any single verdict could.
How did Freud read this symbol?
Freud would attend to the footing. An animal standing where nothing should be able to stand makes the impossible look routine, and he would ask what the dreamer was doing that others found unaccountable.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that it goes up the face for salt. The extraordinary behaviour is in service of something entirely mundane, and there is nothing heroic in it from the animal's side.
Our summary of a Jungian reading, in our own words, not Jung's. See Jung, ed., Man and His Symbols (1964).What does modern dream research say?
Animals appear in dream reports according to actual exposure, and continuity research finds species occurring in proportion to real encounters rather than to how striking they are.
Our summary of the continuity hypothesis, named by Calvin Hall and Vernon Nordby, The Individual and His Dreams (1972). Its correct scope is disputed; see Domhoff (2017) and the replies to him.What do myth and folklore say?
The Pyrenean ibex died out and was briefly brought back by cloning, with the clone surviving only minutes, so the animal has the distinction of having been lost a second time.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.How can writers use this symbol?
The same symbol, read as craft material rather than as a dream. What it does on the page, how genres use it differently, and what happens when you turn it inside out. Written for novelists, screenwriters and poets who need the symbol to actually work, and it ends with something to try.
Where does this appear in literature?
It is the only animal to have gone extinct twice. The second one lived about seven minutes.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
Doing the impossible for an entirely ordinary reason.
What are the genre conventions?
A vertical dam wall, and goats standing on it licking stone.
How to subvert it
Write the salt being put somewhere easier.
Try this
Two hundred words about something that looks like courage and is only an errand.
Only the first of these names a source. What a symbol does in a story, how genres treat it, how to invert it and what to try are our editorial judgement as writers and editors, not findings from a body of research. They are offered as craft opinion and should be argued with.
The books behind these readings
These are the books this entry actually draws on, not a general reading list. Where a text is in the public domain we link the free copy first, because you should not have to pay for something you can read for nothing. Every edition listed has been checked to exist and to be the right one.
-
The Interpretation of Dreams
The source behind every Freud reading in the dictionary. This is the 1913 Brill translation we adapt from, and it is free to read online.
-
Man and His Symbols
The accessible Jung, and the honest place to start for the archetype material our Jung readings summarise.
Rosmerta Publishing is a member of the Bookshop.org and Amazon Associates affiliate programs. If you buy a book through these links we may earn a small commission, at no extra cost to you. The public-domain texts are always free to read online.