Dreaming about
a bull

A bull is about the most solid picture of raw strength a dream can reach for, half a ton of muscle with horns on the front. Dreaming about a bull usually points to force of some kind, anger that's building, a stubborn situation, or a powerful person you feel you're up against. Sometimes the strength is yours, and the dream is about what you do with it.

Whether the bull charged or stood still decides most of the reading. A bull coming straight at you is about a conflict that feels close, while one grazing calmly is about power held in reserve.

What dreaming about a bull means

Bulls have given English plenty of phrases, and most readings of the dream come from the same places the phrases do.

Anger about to charge

"Seeing red" is how people describe sudden rage, and a bull charging at a red cape is the picture most of us have of it (bulls actually react to the cape's movement, not its color). A bull pawing the ground, snorting and lowering its horns is a good picture of anger just before it goes off, yours or someone else's. If you've been swallowing irritation at work or at home, the bull may be showing you how much has built up.

A stubborn situation

People call someone bullheaded when nothing will move them. If the bull in your dream simply stood in your way, the dream is often about a situation, or a person, that won't budge however hard you push. Taking the bull by the horns is the opposite move, facing the problem head on.

Clumsy force

A bull in a china shop is strength in the wrong place. If the bull was wrecking a kitchen, a church or an office, think about where something is being handled too roughly, and whether the clumsy one might be you.

Dreaming about a bull chasing you

This is the classic bull dream, and it works like any dream of being chased, with more weight behind it. You're running from something powerful, often a person with authority over you or a conflict you've been avoiding. One theory of dreaming holds that chases and attacks are the brain rehearsing danger,^[1] which may be why they feel so physical. If the bull caught you or gored you, the fear is about being hurt by someone stronger. It isn't a warning that you will be.

Dreaming about a black or white bull

A black bull tends to feel the most threatening, and it often stands for anger or a power you don't fully understand. A white bull is rarer and stranger. In Greek myth Zeus became a white bull to carry off Europa, so it can carry a sense of something beautiful that isn't what it seems.

Dreaming about riding a bull

Staying on a bucking bull is about holding on through something wild, a chaotic stretch at work or a relationship with big ups and downs. Rodeo riders only need to last eight seconds, and the dream is often about simply getting through. Falling off suggests the situation feels like it has thrown you, and staying on is the confident version.

Dreaming about a bullfight

Watching a bullfight puts you in the stands of someone else's conflict, perhaps a fight between people you love. If you were the matador, the dream is about facing something dangerous with skill and nerve, and if you were rooting for the bull, ask where you side with the one being provoked.

The bull in myth

The bull has been sacred and feared for as long as people have kept cattle. Ancient Crete had the Minotaur, half man and half bull, kept at the center of a maze until Theseus killed it. A dream bull in a labyrinth can point to an angry or shameful part of yourself you've hidden away. And if you'd watched a bullfight, a rodeo or the Pamplona bull run on TV that week, the dream may have started there.^[2]

Dreaming about a bull according to Jung and Freud

Neither list of symbols has a bull in it, so these sections turn each man's ideas on the animal.

Jung: the temper you keep penned

Through Jung's idea of the shadow, a bull is the anger you've been too polite to show, penned up all day and let out at night.^[3] Jung held that the traits we refuse to own gather out of sight and come back in dreams as something we fear, and his answer was to meet them. He wrote nothing on bulls, so this is his idea turned on one, and it says to face the bull like the matador and not run.

Freud: whose wish is the charge?

Freud left no reading of bulls, so this is his method alone, which puts your own associations first (a person, a farm, a bullfight) and any symbol list after.^[4] And since he saw a dream as a wish dressed up, a charging bull raises a sharper question, whether the charge is your wish to flatten someone who has been pushing you around or theirs to flatten you.

Other readings

Artemidorus, a 2nd-century Greek diviner who collected dreams and their outcomes from market and festival diviners, took a bull for serious danger, most of all one that threatened or chased, and for a poor dreamer or a slave a threat from someone powerful.^[5] That's the powerful-person reading above, almost two thousand years old.

The spiritual meaning of a bull in dreams

Bulls in Buddhist and Hindu texts

In the Jataka, the Pali collection of the Buddha's former births, a frightened king brings the Buddha sixteen dreams, and the first is of four black bulls that roar but never fight. The Buddha reads it as clouds that gather and thunder in a far-off age without bringing rain.^[6] The Agni Purana, a Sanskrit text on myth and ritual that includes a chapter of dream omens, lists climbing onto a bull among the good ones, which sides with the rider in the rodeo dream.^[7]

Questions to ask about your bull dream

A bull is all about power, so the questions are mostly about who has it, and whether you felt you had any.

• Did the bull charge, block you, or ignore you?
• Who in your life does it remind you of?
• Were you running, fighting, riding or watching?
• What has made you angry lately that you haven't said?

Before reading a bull dream, Oniri asks about the people and pressures in your week, since that's usually where the bull comes from.