A seal in dreams is the sleek marine mammal that hunts with ease underwater but hauls out onto rock, ice, or sand to rest, awkward and exposed on land after being quick and hidden in the sea.
A seal dream is usually organised around a contrast between two very different states: grace and near-invisibility in water, and a slower, more vulnerable presence once out on land or ice. A seal's large, dark eyes and its habit of watching an approaching boat or person closely, without fleeing at once, also give it a distinctly attentive presence in a dream compared with most other marine animals.
This combination of underwater ease and land-bound vulnerability sets a seal apart from the catalogue's own otter, whose comfort extends to both water and shore, and from its own dolphin and whale, whose size and power give them a very different, more untouchable presence. A seal dream is more often about a specific and temporary exposure, being caught out of one's own element, than about power or vastness.
Seals have a long place in the folklore of Scotland, Ireland, and the Faroe Islands as selkies, seals able to shed their skin and take human form on land; if the discarded sealskin is found and hidden by someone else, the selkie cannot return to the sea and must remain, unwillingly, in human form until the skin is recovered. The best-known telling of this story survives as a traditional ballad collected in the nineteenth century.
Cultural
In Scottish, Irish, and Faroese folklore, a selkie is a seal that comes ashore, sheds its skin, and walks as a human for as long as the skin remains hidden or lost; the best-known version of the story survives as a traditional ballad in which a selkie's stolen skin, and the child born while he is trapped in human form, drive the plot to its end.
- Child, F.J. (ed.) (1882-1898). The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, no. 113, "The Great Silkie of Sule Skerry."
Jungian
The selkie's double nature, entirely at home as an animal in the sea and only temporarily, and often unhappily, bound to a human shape on land, echoes the broader pattern Jungian readings give to shapeshifting animal figures in folklore: an instinctual nature that can be constrained for a time but not permanently possessed or tamed.
Religious
In Inuit tradition, the seal is understood as one of the creatures descended from Sedna, the goddess who governs the sea and its animals; a successful hunt depends on Sedna's favour, traditionally secured through ritual observance and, when she is thought to be angered, the intervention of a shaman on her behalf.
- Boas, F. (1888). The Central Eskimo.
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