What does rats mean in a dream?

The rat in a dream resists the single-function reading that most popular dream dictionaries offer. It is not simply "the shadow" or "repressed sexuality" or "betrayal," though it may carry any of these valences depending on context. The more honest answer begins with a methodological insistence from Hillman: dream animals are not images of animals standing in for something else — they are images as animals, presences with their own specific psychic gravity.

To look at them from an underworld perspective means to regard them as carriers of soul, perhaps totem carriers of our own free-soul or death-soul, there to help us see in the dark. To find out who they are and what they are doing there in the dream, we must first of all watch the image and pay less attention to our own reactions to it.

This is the first discipline the rat demands: before you interpret, you watch. What is the rat doing? Where is it? What is your relationship to it in the dream? A rat caught writhing in a trap carries entirely different psychic weight than a rat moving freely through walls, or a rat that bites you, or a rat you are feeding.

Jung's approach in the dream seminars was similarly concrete: describe the animal to someone who has never seen one. The rat is a creature that lives in the margins of human habitation — in walls, basements, sewers, the underside of the household. It is nocturnal, hidden, adaptive, and survives on what falls through the cracks. It gnaws through partitions. It carries disease across boundaries that humans try to maintain as clean. Hillman's description of the mouse (the rat's close cousin in the dream vocabulary) is instructive here: the mouse "does not allow paranoid partitions by making holes and opening the ways that humans fear as 'contamination'" (Hillman, 2008). The rat operates in the same register, but with more force — more brazen, more feared, more culturally loaded with disgust.

This disgust is itself psychically significant. Karen Signell, working with women's dreams, records a case in which a dreamer finds a rat caught in a trap in her kitchen — still alive, writhing — and must dispose of it. The dreamer's first association was to a shadow quality she had caught herself enacting: the impulse toward an affair, the "dirty rat" in herself she had not yet acknowledged. But Signell notes that the dream carried a second layer: the rat writhing in the trap was also a metaphor for the dreamer's current relationship, in which she was the one trapped and writhing, needing the ruthless mercy of an ending (Signell, 1991). The same image held both the personal shadow and the dreamer's own entrapment — the rat as what you have been suppressing and as what you yourself have become.

This doubling is characteristic. The rat tends to appear at the intersection of the hidden and the necessary. What gnaws in the dark is not simply bad; it is what has been denied access to the light of the household. Jung noted that assimilating the shadow "gives a man body" — the animal sphere of instinct emerging into consciousness (CW 16, para. 452, cited in Samuels, 1985). The rat, precisely because it is so viscerally repellent to the ego, often marks the location of something the psyche has been most aggressively excluding.

The specific quality of the rat matters enormously. A rat that bites carries a different message than one that simply appears. A rat in the kitchen — the place of nourishment and transformation — speaks differently than a rat in the basement. A dead rat, a caged rat, a rat that looks at you: each is a distinct psychic event. Hillman's instruction holds: do not diagnose the image, turn toward it. The rat has come to tell you something about the particular shape of what has been living in the margins of your life. What you find there is rarely what you feared — or rather, it is exactly what you feared, which is why it has been living in the walls.

  • shadow — the psychic contents the ego excludes; the rat often marks its location
  • dream as underworld — Hillman's argument that dream images are not messages but presences to be encountered on their own terms
  • James Hillman — portrait of the archetypal psychologist who insisted on watching the image before interpreting it
  • mortificatio — the alchemical operation of killing and putrefaction; the rat's underworld associations often touch this register

Sources Cited

  • Hillman, James, 1979, The Dream and the Underworld
  • Hillman, James, 2008, Animal Presences
  • Signell, Karen A., 1991, Wisdom of the Heart: Working with Women's Dreams
  • Samuels, Andrew, 1985, Jung and the Post-Jungians