a running list of symbols and their various attributions of significance
i have a separate page for dreams which kind of makes no sense but oh well

see also: glossary, archetypes, topics

bird

“Birds are thoughts and the flight of thought.”

Jung, Psychology and Alchemy (p. 201)

 

colors

green

“[green is] Aphrodite’s color… Green is also the color of Sophia and the Holy Ghost, the color of life, procreation and resurrection… Green signifies hope and the future.”

Robin van Loben Sels (2003; 78-9), A Dream in the World
(quoted in Kalsched – Trauma and the Soul)

child

see also: topic – childhood/adolescence

“It is this correspondence between child and soul that seems to account for the fact that, in dreams, the child can be said to symbolize the soul or to represent a symbolic carrier of that spiritual substance we refer to as the soul.” 

Donald Kalsched, Trauma and the Soul (p. 58)

“A child and a sphere are both universal symbols of totality.”

Jung, Man and his symbols (p. 219)

crystal

“The crystal is the formed thought that reflects what is to come in what has gone before.” (p. 181)

“The symbol of the crystal signifies the unalterable law of events that comes of itself. In this seed you grasp what is to come.” (p. 203)

Carl Jung, The Red Book

fire

“Yet the flame in which you consumed yourself has illuminated many.”

Carl Jung, The Red Book (p. 391)

heat

“The heat there (the belly of the whale or dragon) is usually so intense that the hero loses his hair, i.e., he is reborn bald as a babe.”

Jung, Psychology and Alchemy (p. 339)

horse

“[The horse] represents the energy you can apply to work.”

Carl Jung, Dream Symbols of the Individuation Process (p. 227)

ladder

♪ no one knows where the ladder goes
you're gonna lose what you love the most
you're not alone in anything
you're not alone in trying to be. ♪
~conor oberst, ladder song
bright eyes - the people's key (2011)

mandala

“The contemplation of a mandala is meant to bring an inner peace, a feeling that life has again found its meaning and order.”

Jung, Man and his symbols (p. 213)

numbers

“One, as the first numeral, is unity.” (Jung, MDR, p. 310)

“Seven is the highest number, the highest stair of the staircase. It would be the sun step, the step of completion.”

Carl Jung, Dream Symbols of the Individuation Process (p. 132)

rain

“The rain showed that the tension between consciousness and the unconscious was being resolved.”

Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (p. 181)

round table

“The round table, incidentally, is a well-known symbol of wholeness and pays a role in mythology.”

Jung, Man and his symbols (p. 215)

seashore

“The seashore, like transitional space, defines an area between the water and the land that unites two opposite realities in a third area that participates in both, yet transcends them.”

Donald Kalsched, Trauma and the Soul (p. 56)

shell

“You are a shell. Empty shells do not spill, they catch.”

Carl Jung, The Red Book (p. 486)

solstice

“The “solstice” indicates a turning point. In alchemy the work is completed in the autumn.”

Jung, Psychology and Alchemy (p. 199)

stairs

“So we can make the hypothesis that perhaps the stairs mean a possible going up to the seventh place, a transformation of the individual into a divine form. You know that is the purpose of the mysteries, to transform man, to give him rebirth into another form of existence which means that his ego-personality ought to change.”

(Jung, 1937, p. 101)

sun

 “[The sun wheel is] a symbol that stands for a psychic happening; it covers an experience of the inner world, and is no doubt as lifelike a representation as the famous rhinoceros with the tick-birds on its back.”

Jung, MDR, p. 164

temenos

We can use this word temenos as a technical term to designate the motif of the delimited space, which often occurs in dreams. It can be a hall, a room, a certain place, a garden, a square in a town, a theater, or a circus. If the space delimited is emphasized at all, it most probably has the meaning of that place in which something is going to happen, the place where the pairs of opposites are being put together

Carl Jung, Dream Symbols of the Individuation Process (p. 163)

toilet

tree

“Now you see, the tree is an archaic symbol which always designates a process of inner growth.”

(Jung, 1937, p. 272)

“Trees in particular were mysterious and seemed to me direct embodiments of the incomprehensible meaning of life.”

Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (p. 67)