A bird of extravagant display whose fanned tail carries in dreams associations of pride, vanity, watchfulness, immortality, and the many-coloured stage of a transformation.
The peacock in dreams is nearly always a male in display, tail fanned, though dreamers also report the folded bird walking ahead of them, a peacock screaming (the call is famously harsh), a peacock in an unlikely place such as a kitchen or a car park, and single feathers found or given. The eye-markings on the tail, the ocelli, are usually what the dreamer remembers most.
The bird is native to the Indian subcontinent and reached the Mediterranean by way of Persia and Greece. Greek myth explains the eyes in the tail: Hera set the hundred-eyed watchman Argus to guard Io, and when Hermes killed him she placed his eyes in the plumage of her sacred bird. In India the peacock is the mount of Kartikeya (Murugan), and Krishna wears a peacock feather in his crown; in Persia the Peacock Throne named the seat of the Mughal and later the Iranian rulers. In early Christian art the peacock stood for immortality, on the belief, repeated by Augustine, that its flesh did not decay.
Because its beauty is entirely a matter of showing, the peacock has also been a standing figure of vanity. "Proud as a peacock" is medieval; in the older moral tradition the bird's ugly feet and harsh voice were held up against its tail as a reminder that display is never the whole creature. Dream peacocks tend to appear where questions of being seen, and of showing or hiding what one has, are already live.
Jungian
The peacock's tail, cauda pavonis, names a stage in the alchemical work that Jung treated as psychologically exact: after the blackness of the nigredo, all colours appear at once, before they resolve into the white of the albedo. He read this as the moment when the contents of the unconscious become visible in their full variety, dazzling and not yet integrated. The many eyes of the tail also belong to what Jung called the motif of "multiple luminosities", the unconscious pictured as a field of small lights or eyes; Argus, whose eyes were set in the peacock's plumage, is the classical form of that image. A dream peacock can therefore mark a point of vivid and disorienting abundance rather than simple vanity.
- Jung, C.G. Mysterium Coniunctionis (CW 14); "On the Nature of the Psyche" (CW 8).
Freudian
Freud described looking and being looked at as paired component instincts, present from childhood, that can be turned into exhibitionism and voyeurism or transformed into shame. The peacock is the animal that displays for a mate, and in a dream it can carry the wish to be seen and admired in a form that does not have to be owned. Which figure is displaying, and who is watching, is the useful question; the peacock's scream, breaking the picture, may be the return of what the display was meant to cover.
- Freud, S. (1905). Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.
Cultural
Ovid tells the story of Argus and the eyes in the first book of the Metamorphoses. The bird reached Europe as a luxury of the Roman table and later of the medieval feast, served in its own feathers, and became the emblem of the aesthetic movement in the 1870s, most visibly in Whistler's Peacock Room. In India the peacock is the national bird and the companion of Kartikeya; a peacock feather in Krishna's crown is among the most reproduced images in the subcontinent. Folk belief in Britain long held the feathers unlucky indoors, on account of the "evil eye" in their pattern, an old counter-current to the bird's glamour.
- Ovid. Metamorphoses, Book I.
Religious
Augustine records the belief that peacock flesh does not rot, and on that basis the bird became a sign of the incorruptible body and of resurrection in early Christian mosaics and sarcophagi, often shown drinking from a chalice or flanking the tree of life. In Yazidi belief Tawûsê Melek, the Peacock Angel, is the chief of the seven angels to whom God entrusted the world. In Hindu iconography the peacock carries Kartikeya, and in Vajrayana Buddhism the bird that is said to eat poisonous plants and turn them into the colours of its tail stands for the transformation of the mental poisons on the path.
- Augustine. The City of God, Book XXI, chapter 4.
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