Horses

The dream dictionaries reach for freedom and power, and stop: a horse means strength unbridled, the wild self you long to be. It flatters the dreamer and explains nothing. But the dream rarely hands you a horse standing free in a field. There is the horse you ride and the horse that throws you; the horse that bears you somewhere and the horse that bolts; the mangled animal and the winged one. The tradition does not read the horse as a feeling. It reads it as the body’s own intelligence — instinct given four legs and a will — and the only useful questions are what this horse is doing, and whether you are on its back or under its hooves.

Jung is unusually direct about it. “’Horse’ is an archetype that is widely current in mythology and folklore,” he writes; “as an animal it represents the non-human psyche, the subhuman, animal side, the unconscious” (Jung, The Practice of Psychotherapy, 1954). It carries more than one freight. As a beast of burden it draws close to the mother — “witness the Valkyries that bear the dead hero to Valhalla, the Trojan horse” — and as an animal lower than man it stands for “the lower part of the body and the animal impulses that rise from there.” The horse in a dream is the part of you that runs without asking. This is why Jung lingers over a patient’s nightmare of “a frightened horse” tearing through the house at night until it “jumps through the hall window from the fourth floor into the street below,” left “all mangled” — the instinctual life, panicked, destroying itself.

The Greeks felt the same wildness, and called it divine. Walter Burkert records that “myths make Poseidon the direct father of the horse,” sprung from semen spilled on a rock, or born when “Perseus beheaded the Gorgon Medusa with whom Poseidon had lain, a horse and an armed warrior, Pegasus and Chrysaor, leapt from her body” (Burkert, Greek Religion, 1977). The horse comes up out of the dark — out of earthquake, sea, and slaughter. And it cannot be wholly trusted. Ruth Padel notes that “when men think they are controlling them, horses may in fact be responding to divine will”; every great racetrack kept a shrine to Taraxippos, the “Horse-Disturber,” who “makes horses shy and stumble” (Padel, In and Out of the Mind, 1994). The horse that throws you may be obeying something you cannot see. Its “violence is inseparable from their violent divine associations.”

So which horse is it — the one that carries, or the one that bolts? Plato gives the dream its sharpest fork. In the Phaedrus he divides “each soul into three — two horses and a charioteer; and one of the horses was good and the other bad.” The good horse, “upright and cleanly made,” white, “a lover of honour and modesty and temperance,” “needs no touch of the whip, but is guided by word and admonition only” (Plato, Phaedrus, c. 370 BCE). The other drags the whole team off course. To dream a horse is to dream this team: the instinct that pulls toward the vision and the instinct that pulls toward the ground, and you somewhere between, holding the reins or losing them.

The image can also rise. Erich Neumann reads the winged horse as instinct in the act of transformation: Pegasus “belongs to the chthonic-phallic world,” “the offspring of Poseidon,” representing “nature and instinct” — yet what the wings add is “the freeing of libido from the Great Mother and its soaring flight, in other words, its spiritualization” (Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness, 1949). The same animal that bolts in panic can lift. Marie-Louise von Franz finds the secret in why this is possible. Wotan’s “theriomorphic form is the horse,” Sleipnir, “swift as the wind,” and the lesson is that “in the unconscious, spirit and instinct are not opposites” — “new spiritual germs often manifest themselves first in an uprush of sexual libido or instinctive impulses and only later develop their other aspect” (von Franz, The Interpretation of Fairy Tales, 1970). The horse is not the enemy of the higher life. It is the only thing that can carry you there.

Which is why the trauma tradition reads the horse as the body coming back online. Peter Levine names it plainly: “in dreams, mythical stories, and lore, one universal symbol for the human body and its instinctual nature is the horse.” When Medusa was slain, Pegasus and the sworded warrior emerged together, and “the horse symbolizes instinctual grounding, while wings create an image of movement, soaring” (Levine, Waking the Tiger, 1997). For a body that has learned to freeze, a dreamed horse is the return of motion itself — the instinct that ran for cover, daring to run again.

So the question the dream asks is not whether you want to be free. It is what this animal is doing, and where you stand in relation to it. Are you mounted and steering, or thrown and trampled; is the horse panicking through the house or carrying you out of it; does it need the whip, or none at all? The horse is the instinctual life made visible — older than your will, stronger than your reasons, and not, finally, against you. The dream is not asking you to break it. It is asking whether you are ready to ride.