Dreaming of a centaur : what can this symbol evoke?

Instinct and reason in a single body

In analytical reading, the horse figures the instinctive force that carries a life : powerful, prior to will, and capable of running away with its rider. The centaur removes the distance between the two. Where a rider can dismount, it must permanently negotiate with what, within itself, cannot be reasoned with. It is a figure of the human being as it actually is, not as it dreams itself : a speaking mind harnessed to a wanting body. Greek myth gave this race two faces — the drunken, violent centaurs at the Lapiths' wedding, and Chiron, tutor of heroes, the most learned of beings. The same body can produce either. The dream specifies which one it shows you.

Chiron, or the wound that teaches

Chiron deserves particular attention, because he has become a figure in his own right in psychology. Immortal, he was wounded by a poisoned arrow, and his wound could neither kill him nor heal. From that incurable wound he drew his physician's knowledge and his art of teaching. The notion of the wounded healer, taken up by Jung in his thinking on the therapeutic relationship, comes from there : no one truly treats what they have not experienced. If your dream stages a benevolent, learned centaur who shows or transmits something, it is most likely that figure — and the question becomes : from which wound was your competence born?

The centaur's face and the context change the reading

• A calm centaur, teaching or accompanying — evokes an agreement found between your demands and your impulses, often dearly won.
• A drunken or violent centaur — points to an instinctive force that has taken over, no longer controlled by the speaking part.
• Watching it rear without being able to stop it — reflects a bodily or emotional reaction overflowing the will, in a specific situation.
• A centaur wounded in the flank — recalls Chiron : an old suffering become knowledge, which nonetheless does not close.
• Being a centaur oneself — concerns accepting one's double nature, and the sometimes relieving impossibility of choosing between the two.

A psychological reading, not a ready-made box

Analytical psychology sees composite beings as attempts to represent what consciousness wrongly separates : body and mind, nature and culture, animal and human. Their appearance often signals that an opposition held to be obvious asks to be reconsidered. Other readings stress the wounded healer motif and its clinical use.