Dreaming of a feather : what can this symbol evoke?

Weighed against the heart

Ancient Egypt places at the threshold of the afterlife a scale where the dead person's heart is weighed against a feather. The disproportion is the subject : it is not the heart's heaviness that is measured, but its capacity to weigh no more than almost nothing.

Dreams often use this image without citing it. A feather appearing at the moment of a judgement, an assessment, an accounting, designates a criterion other than the expected one : not what you achieved, but what you still carry.

The question it poses is unusual and precise : what in you weighs? The dreamers concerned often inventory their successes while the dream asks about their grudges.

The remnant of a flight

A found feather is proof a bird passed, and the admission that it is no longer there. It attests without giving : one holds the trace, not the thing.

Dreams often use this figure when something happened and only a sign remains. An inspiration of which one kept a note, an encounter of which a sentence remains, a capacity one had and is no longer sure of. It is not nothing : a feather proves flight is possible.

What to remember is what you do with it. Picking it up, keeping it, blowing on it, or leaving it where it lies tell four different relations to what has passed and will not be caught.

What the feather shows changes the reading

• A feather on a scale pan — a criterion of judgement other than the one you expected.
• A feather found on the ground — proof that something happened, and is no longer there.
• A feather that does not fall, that floats — what escapes ordinary gravity and cannot be seized.
• Covering oneself with feathers — wanting the capacity for flight without the means, an ancient and still true motif.
• A white feather — in several cultures a sign addressed to someone : by whom and why remains to be seen.
• A plucked feather — what was taken from someone of a capacity that was theirs.

A psychological reading, not a ready-made box

Depth psychology places feathers on the side of traces rather than objects : they attest a passage and designate what is no longer there. It notes that such dreams often accompany periods when someone doubts a capacity they have nonetheless exercised. Other readings retain the Egyptian weighing and the question it poses : not what one did, but what one still carries.