A large white waterbird of grace and paired devotion, associated in dreams with beauty, transformation, fidelity, and the song said to come only at death.
Swans in dreams are most often seen on still water: a single bird gliding, a pair with necks curved toward each other, or a swan taking off with the laboured, thunderous wingbeats that seem at odds with its stillness on the surface. Less common but well attested are the aggressive swan, hissing and beating its wings; the black swan; and the swan that is wounded, dying, or turning into a person.
The bird's history in story is long. Zeus took the form of a swan to approach Leda; swans drew Apollo's chariot; and in Plato's Phaedo Socrates takes the swans' singing before death as a song of joy rather than grief, the origin of the phrase "swan song". Northern European folklore is full of swan maidens who shed their feather cloaks to bathe and are bound to whoever hides the cloak, and of children turned into swans by a jealous stepmother, as in the Irish Children of Lir and the Grimms' "The Six Swans". Andersen's "The Ugly Duckling" (1843) and Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake (1877) fixed the modern associations of late-recognised beauty and of enchantment broken only by love.
The swan's double nature matters in dreams: serene above the water and working hard beneath it, gentle in appearance and capable of real violence in defence of a nest. Colour is also noted by dreamers. The white swan has long stood for purity and light, while the black swan, a real Australian species, became in Western usage a byword for the supposedly impossible thing that turns out to exist.
Jungian
Jung placed the swan among the solar birds. In Symbols of Transformation he connects the swan of the Lohengrin legend with the sun-hero who sails away westward, and notes the shared root that the words for swan and sun were once thought to have; the swan song is then the song of the setting sun, of libido withdrawing before renewal. The swan maiden, a bird that becomes a woman when her cloak is removed, is a form of the anima: an image of the inner feminine that can be held only on its own terms and leaves when the cloak is found. Dreams of a swan that is both animal and person belong to this material.
- Jung, C.G. (1912/1952). Symbols of Transformation (Collected Works vol. 5).
Freudian
The Leda myth, in which a god disguises his approach as a bird, is a ready example of what Freud called the dream-work's need to represent a sexual wish in an acceptable form. The swan's long neck, its white plumage, and its reputation for lifelong pairing let it stand for desire while keeping the surface decorous, and the contrast between its calm surface and the effort hidden beneath the water mirrors the relation between manifest and latent content. An attacking swan in a dream can carry the aggression that the idealised image otherwise conceals.
Cultural
The swan maiden is one of the most widely distributed folk-tale types, found from Ireland to Japan and Central Asia: a supernatural bride whose feather garment is stolen and who returns to the sky when she recovers it. The Children of Lir, the Grimms' "Six Swans", and the Wagnerian Lohengrin belong to the related family of humans enchanted into swan form. Plato's Phaedo gives the swan song its classical warrant, and the ballet Swan Lake, with its white and black swans, Odette and Odile, supplied the twentieth century's most familiar image of the bird as a divided self.
- Plato. Phaedo, 84e–85b.
Religious
In Hindu tradition the hamsa, a swan or wild goose, is the mount of Brahma and of Saraswati, goddess of learning and the arts. The hamsa is said to be able to drink only the milk from a mixture of milk and water, and so became the image of discrimination between the real and the unreal; the title paramahamsa, "supreme swan", is given to renunciants held to have attained that discernment. The syllables ham-sa are also read as the sound of the breath, so that the bird stands for the individual soul moving between inhalation and exhalation. A swan in this context is less an object of beauty than a figure for the self that is not bound by what it moves through.
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