The Dream Book of Self-Knowledge
- belongs to the instinctual level of experience and is usually counted among the symbols of ignorance, stupidity, easy susceptivity and narrowness, and it is therefore no wonder that other animal instinctual symbols (e.g. cat and dog) can take care of the chicken in dreams, so we can easily recognize the mutual relations and surprising connections between instinctual and sexual symbols.
- the desire to view life in the simplest possible framework and live life without complications is also attributed to the chicken.
- plucked: the dreamer longs to know the essence of the symbol.
- eating: the futile desire to eliminate within one's mind the traits linked to a chicken: usually brings disillusionment followed by melancholy.
- in dreams of adolescents and young people it can symbolize the desire to remain in childhood and not be burdened by sexual antitheses, which, although sex itself does not rule this out, does not give them the chance to fully experience a feeling of pure ecstasy.
- chicken meat: has a clear link to sexuality and eating it symbolizes the submission to those subtle, often romantic impulses arising from within; white chicken meat lulls the dreamer into the conviction that sexuality is pure feeling.
- chicken bones: if they are oblong, they are always, despite their small size, among the phallic symbols.
- hens with chickens: the idea of family happiness beyond which, however, the dreamer does not realize the negative traits linked to the symbol of the chicken and hen.
- in a barn, in a shed or in a henhouse or around them intensifies the negativity of the symbol.
- feeding: see Feeding.
- aggressive chickens: lack of concentration, distractibility, excessive thoughts of an instinctual nature.
- killing: the dreamer will temporarily rid himself of the effects of the symbol, but these impulses will soon rise to life again and threaten the dreamer's power over himself; the life and death of chickens needs to be left to the unconscious which shows us through their fate the true state of the mind.
- dead chickens (not caused by the dreamer): a positive dream since this image ends the symbol's life in the subconscious, it is then only up to the dreamer whether this is permanent or temporary.
- frozen (usually hens and sometimes even with a rooster): even the momentary ascension of the consciousness to the spiritual level manages to uproot from a person's mind the traits linked to the chicken and his parents and to the relaxed feeling of enlightenment to recognize the path to knowledge.
- a person changing into a chicken: an allegory of the fall of a person to the animalistic level, here symbolized by ignorance (the chicken); the dreamer can see such an image from the higher levels of consciousness as a consequence of the instinctual part no longer viable (in viewing from the spiritual level, compassion for the transforming person and chicken is always present).
- understanding the speech of chickens: a dream in which the entire "chicken saga" culminates; the dreamer proves in this dream that he has fully understood the inner meaning of the chicken symbol in the unconscious and in dreams.
