The Dream Archive

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Search across 2,348 dream symbols drawn from the older dream books and the public archive. Each entry carries an original interpretive note for the contemporary dreamer.

From the Dream Archive
Cage medallion
Cage

Cage

A cage full of birds in a dream can mark great wealth and beauty possessed — yet to let the birds out marks loss. The dream holds the tension of the cage: abundance kept and contained, freedom given up for safekeeping. The dream tends to ask what we are holding captive for our own pleasure, and what it costs to keep it.

Miller 1901Fontaine 1862
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What the old dream-books say

These are the entries the historical dream-books record for cage, in their own words. They are period voices, not predictions, and they do not always agree with one another.

Gustavus Hindman Miller, 1901

Ten Thousand Dreams Interpreted

In your dreaming if you see a cageful of birds, you will be the happy possessor of immense wealth and many beautiful and charming children. To see only one bird, you will contract a desirable and wealthy marriage. No bird indicates a member of the family lost, either by elopement or death.

To see wild animals caged, denotes that you will triumph over your enemies and misfortunes. If you are in the cage with them, it denotes harrowing scenes from accidents while traveling.

Fontaine, 1862

The Golden Wheel Dream-book

To dream of letting birds out of a cage, is a sign that you will lose something. If a young girl dreams this, it predicts a loss of her chastity.