Dreaming of a cyclops : what can this symbol evoke?

Seeing without perspective

Depth is born of the gap between two eyes : it is the difference between the two images that allows things to be placed. A single eye sees perfectly and cannot situate : everything is equally present, nothing is nearer.

Dreams use this figure for a way of understanding that lacks neither intelligence nor information : it lacks distance. A conviction held with force, a judgement passed without contradiction, a view right on one point and blind to the rest. The cyclops is not stupid : he is monocular.

The question it poses is this : on what do you hold a view whose distance you have never tested? Rarely our subjects of ignorance, more often those where we believe ourselves competent.

The giant not beaten by force

Odysseus does not confront Polyphemus : he makes him drink, gives his name as Nobody, and escapes beneath the bellies of the sheep. Force is set aside from the start as a means, and cunning prevails.

That detail gives the symbol its practical use. The cyclops dream often stages a power nothing can be opposed to directly : a hierarchy, an administration, a crushing character in a family. It also indicates that an answer exists, and that it is lateral.

What to remember is your position. Being in the cave, getting out, or watching from afar tell three different relations to a force that cannot be argued with — and Odysseus's cunning consists first in not naming himself.

What the creature does changes the reading

• A single eye fixed on you — a judgement without nuance, seeing everything and situating nothing.
• Seeing oneself as a cyclops — a personal conviction held without ever testing its distance.
• Being shut in the cave — a situation whose exit is not frontal, and must be gone around.
• Giving a false name — Odysseus's cunning : evading the gaze rather than confronting it.
• The cyclops not seeing you pass — the blind spot of an otherwise crushing force.
• A cyclops smith — the older version of the myth, where these giants forge the thunderbolt : a power in another's service.

A psychological reading, not a ready-made box

Depth psychology takes an interest in figures that see badly rather than blind ones : they describe a consciousness that works and errs, which is the ordinary situation. The gaze without perspective designates one-sidedness, the tendency to develop a single function and judge everything with it. Other readings retain the motif of cunning and recall it is the resource of the weak, which is no inferiority.