The Dream Book of Self-Knowledge
- a frequent phallic symbol.
- catching an animal by the tail: if the animal can attack from this position, then the dreamer takes relationships (instinctual and emotional) by the wrong end, but if this grasp is secure then the dream controls the traits linked to the caught animal (see individual animals).
- animal wagging its tail: overly friendly instincts, whose harmony with the dreamer's soul prevents emotional growth.
- seeing two tails on an animals: The dreamer subconsciously and usually indifferently realizes the intensified instinctual essence represented by the animal with two tails; this dream is usually the result of an emotional and instinctual mindset or appears in people who chose and successfully live in voluntary celibacy – more on the theme of celibacy and its results in the chapter Celibacy and Redemptive Asceticism from the book "Secrets of the Unconscious Order."
- of a peacock: usually a symbol of male pride and vanity; see Peacock.
- an animal with objects tied to its tail: the unconscious is warning a dreaming man of a subtle but dangerous increase in male vanity, a dreaming woman of an encounter with a vain man.
- a dragon eating its own tail (Ouroboros): a symbol of evolution that is ceaselessly renewed through its own destruction in endless motion; this image is understood as the essence of being and as a creative element in which nothing dies, nothing is lost and it is reborn in itself like prima materia (the first matter), which is one of the cornerstones of alchemy.
