Dreaming about a black horse: strength, mystery and meaning

Dreaming about a black horse: what the scene usually points to

Dream interpretation is not prediction and not diagnosis. This article separates what sleep research observes from what popular interpretation associates with the theme, always saying which is which.

Dreaming about a black horse is not an announcement of mourning, illness or danger ahead. Most of the time, the scene shows up in periods when some great force is at play: a decision that takes courage, a project that suddenly picked up speed, a strong emotion you do not yet know how to steer. The black usually adds mystery, the feeling of dealing with something you cannot see in full.

The question that helps the most is a simple one: who was in charge, you or the horse? Riding with a firm hand tends to come with a sense of control; being carried off by a runaway animal, with distress. The general meaning of the animal in dreams is covered in dreaming about a horse; here the focus is on what the dark color and the most common scenes add.

Read also: Dreaming about a white horse and Dreaming about a bull.

Why the black horse gets into the dream

In 2003, Michael Schredl and Friedrich Hofmann showed that dreams tend to follow what fills waking life. The black horse has many roads into the night. In fiction, it is an old character: Black Beauty, Anna Sewell's novel narrated by a black horse, has had several adaptations, and Zorro rode Tornado, also a black horse. On social media, videos of Friesian horses circulate widely, a breed of Dutch origin known for its black coat. In the countryside, a trail ride or the neighbor's horse is enough.

The animal's biology also helps to understand the dream. In nature, the horse is a prey animal: when startled, its typical reaction is to flee, and when it feels cornered it may rear up or kick. Beautiful and unpredictable at the same time: that mix is what comes back in the dream. A curious fact: horses can doze standing up, but they need to lie down to enter REM sleep, the stage of the most vivid dreams. The review by John Peever and Patrick Fuller points out that this stage appears in different ways across species.

Sources: Schredl and Hofmann, Continuity between waking activities and dream activities, Consciousness and Cognition, 2003; Peever and Fuller, The biology of REM sleep, Current Biology, 2017.

Scenes with a black horse and what usually goes with them

If the scene ended with a fall, see dreaming that you are falling; if the horse was running after you, see dreaming that you are being chased.

See also: Dreaming about a dog biting and Dreaming about a black dog.

When the black horse turns into a nightmare

Sometimes the black horse arrives as a threat: it charges, knocks you down, chases you. In an online study of recent nightmares, Michael Schredl and Anja Göritz found being chased and suffering physical aggression among the themes reported, and a large, dark animal is one of the shapes that scene can take. Anyone who has fallen off a horse or been kicked by one may see that scare come back at night for a while, which is to be expected.

A single dream does not call for any action. It deserves attention when the nightmare repeats several times a week, when you wake up with your heart racing or when you start to be afraid of going to sleep. Frequent nightmares have treatments with good evidence behind them, and the first step is to talk to a health professional. See how to have fewer nightmares.

Sources: Schredl and Göritz, Nightmare Themes, Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, 2018; Morgenthaler and colleagues, Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, 2018.

The black horse for Freud, Jung and faith

In Freud's psychoanalysis. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud tells one of his own dreams in which he rode a gray horse with more and more confidence. He barely knew how to ride and, in those days, was suffering from painful boils; he concluded that the dream denied the pain so that he could keep sleeping. And the color had a concrete origin: the gray matched the black and white mixed fabric of a colleague's suit. The lesson applies to the black horse too: before looking for a symbol, ask yourself where you saw that black recently.

In Jung's psychology. Jung used the word shadow for the part of the personality a person does not recognize as their own, and Man and His Symbols treats the animals in dreams as images of our instinctive nature. In this key, a dark, strong horse may stand for an energy that has not yet been integrated. It is not necessarily something bad: often it is exactly the strength that is missing in waking life.

In symbols and faith. A Dictionary of Symbols associates the dark horse with the forces of the earth and of the night, not yet tamed, and the white horse with the sky and with light. In the Bible, Revelation 6 describes four horsemen, and the third one rides a black horse and holds a pair of balances in his hand. Many Christian readers associate this rider with scarcity. It is a symbolic text, read in different ways by different Christian traditions, and none of them teaches that dreaming about a black horse repeats the prophecy.

Bringing both readings together. Research explains where the image came from; psychology and faith ask what this force is asking of you, starting with who was holding the reins.

Sources: Freud, Die Traumdeutung, 1900; Jung (ed.), Man and His Symbols; Chevalier and Gheerbrant, A Dictionary of Symbols.

The black horse in dream books

O Livro dos Sonhos, a Brazilian dream book by L. P. Baçan, has no entry for a black horse; the color does not count. The entry for horse sums up the tradition like this: in life, false friends; in love, dissatisfaction. For anyone who dreamed they were riding, the book also has an entry for horseman: in life, difficult dreams; in love, agitation.

Freud distrusted these fixed keys: in the dream of the gray horse, the meaning only appeared when he looked at his own week, not at a table.

Sources: Freud, Die Traumdeutung, 1900; L. P. Baçan, O Livro dos Sonhos, 2014.

What folk tradition says about the black horse

In Brazilian folk reading, the black horse is usually associated with strength, mystery and a victory won through effort. A wild black horse would be a sign of an obstacle or of a difficult person nearby; a tamed one, of overcoming; a running one, of news and quick changes. Because of the color, some people link it to mourning, but that is not the most common reading. In part of umbanda, an Afro-Brazilian religion that blends African, Indigenous and Catholic roots, the medium who receives a spirit entity during a ceremony is called a "cavalo", the Portuguese word for horse, because the entity is said to "ride" the person. For those who attend a terreiro (the house of worship of these traditions), the dream may bring back that memory; see dreaming that you are being incorporated by a spirit. These are interpretations from tradition, which change from region to region and predict nothing. See what dream meanings look like according to science and culture.