Dogs

The dream dictionaries reach for the obvious: a dog means loyalty, friendship, protection, the part of you that is faithful and good. It flatters the image and stops there. But the dog of dreams is rarely the dog at your feet. There is the snarling black dog at a doorway and the one that licks your hand; the dog that runs beside you and the pack that runs you down; the stray that follows a funeral and the companion that swims you across a river you cannot see the far bank of. The tradition does not read the dog as a synonym for friendship. It reads it as a creature of the threshold — the animal that knows the way between the living and the dead — and the only useful questions are what this dog is doing, and which direction it is facing.

Begin by refusing the easy move that turns the animal into a feeling. James Hillman warns against exactly this: to read the dream-animal as instinct, “vitality,” your own power or appetite, is to miss it entirely. “No animal ever means one thing only, and no animal simply means death,” he writes, and yet in the old underworld myth “only a few kinds of animal crop up regularly: The dog of Hekate, Cerberus of Hades, and the blue-black dog-jackal, Anubis” (Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld, 1979). The dog is not your loyalty. It is a carrier of soul, there to help you see in the dark.

What it guards is a border. Anne Baring traces the image to its root: on the painted vases of Old Europe the dog stands beside the Tree of Life, and “in later civilizations the dog guards the threshold between the realms of the living and the dead” — Anubis in Egypt guiding souls into the underworld, three-headed Cerberus at the gate of Hades in Greece (Baring, The Myth of the Goddess, 1991). The dog is posted where two worlds touch. To dream one is to find yourself at that post.

The Greeks placed the dog low and close to the dead on purpose. Ruth Padel notes that dogs “had a low place in the sacrificial system,” offered to “marginal,” “tainted” gods — to Hecate, to the chthonic powers — as “mythic or cult protectors of dark, secret places, tombs, shrines, the underworld: of the threshold between living and dead, light and dark” (Padel, In and Out of the Mind, 1994). But this same animal turns and hunts. Padel finds the maddening Erinyes themselves imagined as a pack: when Orestes sees the Furies he cries, “Clearly these are my mother’s furious hounds.” Even madness, in the Greek ear, is canine — a tearing at the one who feeds it.

Edward Edinger reads that double face straight into the dream. “In dreams the appearance of a vicious dog or a black dog can generally be thought of as a reference to Cerberus, to the dark and dangerous aspect of the unconscious which must be treated with care and respect, given its due, its sop” (Edinger, The Mysterium Lectures, 1995). And the dog that hounds is not only an enemy. “It scents out quarry and hounds it to death,” Edinger writes; the “ultimate quarry of the dog as pursuer” is the ego — yet “such hounding comes from the urgency of the Self,” the divine pursuer of Francis Thompson’s “Hound of Heaven,” whose footfall the fugitive finally turns to face. The dog at your back may be what is trying to save you.

So before fear closes the reading, notice which dog this is. Marie-Louise von Franz, working through a fairy tale, finds the helpful dog to be the hero’s shadow made companion — “an animal double,” “intimately bound up with the hero,” and yet “an unknown part of man’s psyche” that completes its work only when the hero is joined with his anima (von Franz, The Interpretation of Fairy Tales, 1970). The dog can be the despised, instinctual part of you that nevertheless walks the road no one else will walk.

And that road, again and again, runs to the dead. Hillman’s “finest nose for the dead” belongs to “the ancestral jackal,” Anubis, “closely associated with decay and decomposition” — a corpse-eater the cultures of the world made holy, a creature he dares to call “a dirty angel” (Hillman, Animal Presences, 2008). Jung records the rite plainly: the ancient Persians led “a dog to the bedside of a dying man, who then had to give the dog a morsel to eat,” and in the Osiris myth “the dogs and jackals, devourers of corpses by night, assist in the reconstitution or reproduction of Osiris” (Jung, Symbols of Transformation, 1952). The animal that eats the body is the same animal that puts the god back together. Joseph Campbell finds the gentlest version of it among the Aztec dead, who took “a little dog” of reddish hair as a guide: the departed “swam on this small animal when he passed the river of the underworld,” arriving at last with his “faithful companion” (Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 2015).

This is why the dream dictionary’s word — loyalty — is not wrong so much as unfinished. The dog is faithful, yes, but faithful to a journey the waking mind would rather not take. It keeps the threshold. It hunts you toward the thing you are fleeing. It eats what has died so that something can be reconstituted. When it appears in a dream, the question is not whether you have a friend. It is whether you will let the dog do its work — guard the border, run you down, carry you across — and trust that the animal with the finest nose for the dead is also the one that knows the way back.