Meaning of dreaming about birds

No Dream Dictionary can do without them: birds, winged creatures that offer such a wide and varied range of interpretations that it is almost impossible to be fair with them.

The main problem in understanding the meaning of dreams about birds comes, in part, from a language disagreement. In his capital work: The Interpretation of Dreams (Die Traumdeutung), Sigmund Freud offers long and often fantastic explanations for this type of dreams, and almost everything we know about them has been collected from him. However, relying solely on the opinions of Sigmund Freud raises a series of unavoidable linguistic problems, since the German word for “bird” is: vogel, and its plural, vogeln, also obscenely designates the act of making love.

For Sigmund Freud, the enigma of dreaming about birds had a fairly close resolution. In the German language, the association between birds and sex is very common, as are dreams about flying. In other languages, the issue presents other difficulties.

Birds often represent the emotional, the intuitive, what cannot be limited: thoughts, desires and hopes. The meaning of dreaming about birds depends largely on the circumstance in which the bird appears in a given dream.

For example, if in the dream we see a bird flying high, it may be an attempt by the subject to express a difficulty in identifying with ideals that he judges to be unattainable, but also with the desire to expand his own consciousness.

In some dreams, birds act as messengers, almost like angelic messengers whose purpose is to deliver a specific message. In this sense, swallows have always been messengers of renewal (spring), roosters, of the future (dawn) and virility, doves of love and peace, and crows and vultures almost always occupy the role of heralds of death. .

If we dream of a large bird, it represents the collective mind that Carl Jung talks about; a kind of human consciousness that can appear as a disturbing and threatening entity, although rarely dangerous.

In dreams where birds attack, we can find a trace of criticism (and guilt) that the subject makes about his or her repressed desires. In a way, birds represent the natural order of things that act unnaturally in the face of a desire that the subject describes as inadequate. This can be seen in greater detail in Daphne Du Maurier’s novel The Birds, adapted to film by the brilliant Alfred Hitchcock.

Many people wonder why the birds attack in the movie. There is no single answer, but we can think that the birds act unnaturally (attacking) in response to the protagonist’s incestuous feelings with respect to his mother, in a certain way, an alteration of the “normal.” According to Hitchcock (and Daphne du Maurier) the attack of the birds is not autonomous, but rather comes from an alteration of the natural course of desire.

Dreaming about birds swooping down symbolizes the descent of the subject’s ideals, which are suddenly attracted to worldly matters. Something similar happens in dreams with caged birds, feathers, and birds flying inside a house. Dreaming about dead birds, on the other hand, signals the end of those longings for freedom and hope.

Dreams about scavenging birds, almost always vultures and crows, represent death, although rarely literally. It can be taken as the death of a project or a relationship. If in the dream we see that birds fight among themselves, then they express internal discussions about a point of vital importance for the subject.

Dreams with tiles, a rare bird, represent the soul that survives the death of the body. The same thing happens in dreams where we see a flock of birds flying towards the horizon.

In dreams where nests (home), eggs (birth) and chicks (childhood) appear, they express quite clear facets that do not require further depth.

To finish, let’s briefly review the meaning of some birds in dreams:

Blackbird (repressed desires); Hen (the feminine); Rooster (the masculine); Stork (motherhood); Black birds (death); Cormorant (intellectuality); Crane (fortune, chance); Cuckoo (infidelity); Duck (consciousness); Eagle (violence); Falcon (domination); Goose (freedom); Owl (instincts); Parrot (prejudices); Peacock (the physical); Penguin (clumsiness); Phoenix (rebirth); Sparrow (the everyday); Swan (beauty).

Dream Dictionary. I The dark side of psychology.

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