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Bird in dreams: what it can mean

  • Animals
  • Nature

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The short answer

Birds bring freedom, messages and sometimes dread, depending on the bird and the dreamer. Many people connect a caged bird with feeling held back and a bird in flight with longing.

Your dream is not everyone's

Tell it the way you remember it. You get a reading about your dream and your life, not a dictionary entry.

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Three ways to read it

Psychology and research

Research

Animals are a regular part of dream content, and the continuity view suggests each animal carries the dreamer's own associations. A dove, a crow and a parrot mean different things to different people and cultures. The emotion is the best guide: was the bird free, trapped, singing, injured or coming toward you?

Classic texts

History

Artemidorus read different birds as different kinds of people and news, with large birds of prey tied to powerful people and smaller birds to ordinary life and talk. His method was to ask what the bird was like and what it did, a question worth asking of your own dream.

Folk tradition

Tradition, not science

Tradition: American popular dream books, around 1900

Miller's 1901 dream dictionary read birds of beautiful plumage as a hopeful sign for love and marriage, and wounded or dead birds as sorrow. It is one old popular tradition, reported here as history, not as a prediction.

Questions to ask yourself

  1. Was the bird free or trapped, and how did that feel?
  2. What news or message are you waiting for?
  3. Where in your life do you want more room to fly?

Related symbols

Sources

Every reading on this page comes from these works. Page references have not all been checked yet; those still waiting are marked.

  1. Calvin S. Hall, Robert L. Van de Castle (1966). The Content Analysis of Dreams. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.

    cited, not reproduced

    • Cited at: coding categories: animals (reference not yet checked)

    The standard coding system for dream content (characters, social interactions, misfortunes, emotions, settings, objects) and its normative sample.

  2. G. William Domhoff (2001). A New Neurocognitive Theory of Dreams. Dreaming 11(1): 13-33.

    cited, not reproduced

    • Cited at: pp. 13-33 (dreams as simulations of personal concerns) (reference not yet checked)

    Dreams as embodied simulations of personal concerns (the continuity view). The backbone of our psychology lens.

  3. Artemidorus of Daldis (1644). The Interpretation of Dreams (Oneirocritica), in five books, translated by Robert Wood. London.

    first published 2nd century CE

    public domain

    • Cited at: Book II, on birds (reference not yet checked)

    Greek dream manual from the Roman era. We paraphrase the public-domain Wood translation (1644). Modern translations (White 1975, Harris-McCoy 2012, Hammond 2020) are copyrighted and only cited.

  4. Gustavus Hindman Miller (1901). What's in a Dream (later reissued as Ten Thousand Dreams Interpreted).

    public domain

    • Cited at: entry: Birds (reference not yet checked)

    An American popular dream dictionary. Its entries are written as omens ("foretells"); we only report how people once read a symbol, never as a forecast.