Dreaming about a lion: tame, at home, caged or with cubs

Dreaming about a lion: what the scene usually shows

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 lion does not announce an enemy, a victory or the arrival of someone powerful. The scene tends to show up when something big is on your mind: a new responsibility, an authority figure, a strength of your own that you do not yet quite know how to use. What changes everything is the way the animal behaves. A tame lion lying close to you and a lion chasing after you tell very different stories.

This is the general article about lions in dreams. If the heart of the dream was the pounce, the bite or the fight, that topic is covered in dreaming about a lion attacking. Here you will find the other scenes, from the lioness with cubs to the caged lion.

Read also: Dreaming about a tiger and Dreaming about a jaguar.

Why the lion shows up in the dreams of people who have never seen one

Few people in Brazil have seen a lion outside a zoo, and yet it appears quite often in dreams. The explanation starts with the continuity hypothesis, tested by Michael Schredl and Friedrich Hofmann in 2003: dreams reuse what has passed through waking life. And the lion is everywhere. Cartoons, savanna documentaries, sports team crests, statues at the entrance of old buildings.

Freud recorded a case that shows this path well. A doctor in his thirties had dreamed since childhood of a yellow lion, always the same one. One day, the lion turned up for real: it was a porcelain ornament, lost long before, which his mother said had been his favorite toy in his early years. He had forgotten it. The dream had not.

There is also the side of threat. In the study of typical dreams by Tore Nielsen and colleagues, carried out with Canadian university students, the profile of themes varied little across ages, sexes and regions: these are images many people share.

Sources: Schredl and Hofmann, Continuity between waking activities and dream activities, Consciousness and Cognition, 2003; Freud, Die Traumdeutung, 1900; Nielsen and colleagues, Dreaming, 2003.

Six lion scenes and what usually comes with them

The lioness deserves a bit of biology. Among the big cats, the lion is the only one that lives in organized groups, called prides, and the females in the same pride are usually related. They do most of the hunting, and they often raise the cubs together, nursing the cubs of their companions as well. It is no surprise that the lioness with cubs shows up in phases of family, support networks and protection.

The lion inside the house, on the other hand, is in the wrong place, and the scene often speaks of something that has grown too big for the space set aside for it. If the chase was the center of the scene, read dreaming that you are being chased. If the big cat had spots, see dreaming about a panther or leopard.

See also: Dreaming about a zebra and Dreaming about a pet that died.

When the lion becomes a recurring nightmare

A lion in a dream every now and then is common. It calls for attention when the scene comes back several times a week with a threatening tone, when you wake up with your heart racing and take a long time to fall asleep again. Frequent nightmares have treatments with good evidence, such as imagery rehearsal, in which the person rewrites the ending of the dream while awake and goes over the new version during the day. The first step is to talk to a health professional. See how to have fewer nightmares and why the same dream keeps repeating.

Source: Morgenthaler and colleagues, Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, 2018.

The lion in Freud, Jung and faith

In Freud's psychoanalysis. Freud showed, in his own dreams, that animals also enter dreams through words. While analyzing one of his dreams, he followed a chain of associations to a collection of insults using animal names, such as giraffe, pig and dog, tied to quarrels with colleagues. In Brazil, the lion lives on in everyday expressions: "matar um leão por dia" (to kill a lion a day, meaning to face a hard battle every single day), "leão de chácara" (literally a farm lion, the Brazilian name for a bouncer), and the "leão da Receita", the lion that serves as the symbol of Brazil's income tax. A lion dream right in the middle of tax season may be closer to the spreadsheet than to the savanna.

In Jung's psychology. In Man and His Symbols, Aniela Jaffé writes that the animal motif usually represents the instinctive, primitive nature of human beings. In that key, the tame lion can be read as instinctive strength that has found a place in conscious life; the caged one, as trapped energy.

In symbols and faith. A Dictionary of Symbols describes the lion as a solar symbol, of light and sovereignty. In the Bible, it appears with more than one face. In Isaiah 11:6, the young lion and the calf go together, led by a little child, an image of peace often remembered by people who dream about a tame lion. In Judges 14, Samson faces a lion and later finds bees and honey in the animal's carcass. And in 1 Peter 5:8, the adversary walks about "as a roaring lion", a verse quoted by people who dream they are being chased.

Bringing both readings together. Research explains why the lion reaches the dream; psychology and faith ask what you do with the strength it represents. Notice who was in control of the scene, you or the animal.

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

The lion in the dream book

In O Livro dos Sonhos, a Brazilian dream book, L. P. Baçan sums up the lion in one optimistic line: in life, enemies defeated; in love, passion. The entry does not separate the tame lion from the fierce one, nor the lioness from the male. For the threatening scene, the closest entry is the one for a wild beast: in life, falseness; in love, quarrels. This is folk tradition, not prediction.

Jung distrusted this kind of table. For him, a dream symbol cannot be separated from the person who dreams it: the lion of someone who works at a zoo and the lion of someone who has only seen one on television do not carry the same story.

Sources: L. P. Baçan, O Livro dos Sonhos, 2014; Jung (ed.), Man and His Symbols.

What people usually say about lion dreams

In Brazilian folk reading, a tame lion is a sign of protection and of strength on your side; a lioness with cubs, of a united family and care for the children; a caged lion, of a problem already under control; and a lion running loose after you, of a challenge that calls for courage. These readings change from region to region and predict nothing. See what dream meanings look like according to science and culture.