Dreaming about
elephants

The elephant is the biggest animal on land, and when one walks into a dream its size is rarely about the animal. Dreaming about elephants usually means something large in your life has taken up room in your head. It might be a problem everyone can see and nobody mentions, a memory that won't fade, or a strong and gentle person you lean on, very often an older woman in your family.

Which of these it is depends on what the elephant did. A calm elephant you walk beside, an elephant charging at you and an elephant squeezed into your living room are three different dreams. Your mood in the dream, and whatever has been weighing on you that week, are what settle it.

What dreaming about elephants means

Elephants are huge but mostly gentle, they live in families led by the oldest female, and they're famous for their memory. Each of those facts is a way into the dream.

Something too big to ignore

English has "the elephant in the room" for the obvious problem that everyone politely steps around, and dreams take idioms literally. If the elephant was somewhere it couldn't possibly fit, or everyone in the dream acted as if it wasn't there, ask what's being ignored at home, at work or between you and someone close. It might be a debt, an illness nobody names or a feeling you haven't told your partner about.

A memory that hasn't faded

"An elephant never forgets" is an exaggeration, but not by much. Old female elephants remember distant water holes for years and lead their families to them in a drought. So an elephant can be a memory, good or bad, that has stayed with you longer than you expected. That might be a childhood scene, an old hurt or a grudge you thought you'd dropped. If the elephant seemed to recognize you, ask what from your past has come back lately.

A strong person who protects you

Elephant herds are run by the oldest female, who knows the routes and the water holes, and the whole group closes ranks around the young when there's danger. That makes the elephant a natural picture of a mother, a grandmother or anyone whose quiet strength has kept you safe. Dreams of a gentle elephant often come during a hard patch, when you want that kind of protection, or when you've lost the person who gave it.

Strength you haven't used

There's an old parable about a circus elephant tied as a baby to a small wooden stake. It tried to pull free and couldn't, and as a grown animal it never tried again, though it could have pulled the stake out without noticing. An elephant standing still in your dream, chained or fenced when it plainly didn't need to be, can be you. Where are you holding back out of an old habit, when you're strong enough now to walk away?

Dreaming about an elephant chasing you

An elephant chasing you is a large problem catching up. Elephants aren't fast over long distances, but they don't need to be. A slow, heavy pursuer that you can't shake usually goes with a task, a deadline or a conversation you've put off for too long. Is there one you can name? And if the elephant stopped when you turned to face it, the problem may be smaller up close than it looks from a distance.

Dreaming about a baby elephant

Elephants carry their calves for longer than any other land animal, and a baby elephant in a dream often goes with something you've waited a long time for. That could be a project you've finally started, a relationship that has taken years to settle, or a child, if one is on your mind. Caring for a baby elephant tends to point to a responsibility that feels both sweet and heavy. If you lost it or it wandered off from its herd, look at what new thing in your life feels unprotected.

Dreaming about a white elephant

The most famous elephant dream in history is a white one. In the Nidanakatha, the traditional Pali account of the Buddha's birth, Queen Maya dreamed that a white elephant entered her side, and the brahmins read it as the sign she had conceived a child who would become either a world ruler or a Buddha.^[2] (There's more on Buddhism and dreams in a post of its own.) So a white elephant can be a dream of something precious beginning. But in everyday English a "white elephant" is a possession that costs more to keep than it's worth. If your dream elephant felt like a burden, think of the house, the car or the commitment that has become one.

Dreaming about an elephant attacking you

An elephant that charges or tramples is frightening because elephants are usually so calm. Adult males go through a yearly phase called musth, when their hormones surge and normally placid bulls turn aggressive, and an attacking elephant can stand for something like that. It may be a usually gentle person who has suddenly blown up at you, or a pressure in your life that has turned from heavy to dangerous. And if you were the one who provoked it, ask whether you've pushed someone patient a little too far.

Dreaming about riding an elephant

Riding an elephant puts you on top of something huge, and the feeling decides whether that's power or worry. If you rode easily, you may finally feel in charge of a big situation (a team, a move, a business). But if you were swaying and afraid of falling, you may be in charge of something you don't feel big enough for yet. Being carried by an elephant someone else was guiding can also point to trust, in a parent, a partner or a boss steering your life.

Dreaming about an elephant in your house

A house in a dream is often your private life, and an elephant indoors takes the "elephant in the room" idiom as far as it goes. Something large has moved in and everyone is squeezing past it. What room was it in? An elephant in the kitchen can point to the family, one in the bedroom to your relationship, and one blocking the front door to something stopping you from leaving.

Dreaming about a dead elephant

Elephants pay close attention to their dead, touching the bones and tusks of other elephants with their trunks. A dead elephant in a dream tends to go with grief and with the end of an era, which most of us live through sooner or later. It often comes after losing an older relative, especially a grandparent who held a family together. It can also mean the end of a big burden, the problem you carried for years finally gone, in which case the dream may feel more like relief than sadness.

Dreaming about a herd of elephants

A herd is about family and belonging. Walking with a herd usually reflects feeling part of something, a family, a team or a group of old friends moving in the same direction. Being left behind as the herd moves on is the opposite. It often shows up after a move or a falling-out (or any change that has left you outside a group you used to belong to). A stampeding herd is more like giants in a dream, forces much bigger than you that you can only get out of the way of.

Do elephants dream?

A short detour, since people often ask. Wild elephants sleep less than almost any mammal studied, often standing up, and how much they dream is still unknown. The question of whether animals dream at all has a post of its own.

Dreaming about elephants according to Jung and Freud

The two men left no elephant reading for this page to quote, so what follows applies their ideas to an elephant and says so.

Jung: the elephant as a helpful animal

Jung's list of mother symbols, in his essay on the mother archetype, runs from the church and the sea to the cow and the hare, and ends on "helpful animals in general".^[9] A calm, protective elephant fits that last entry, which is one way to understand why so many people wake from an elephant dream thinking of a mother or a grandmother. Read this way, the dream isn't about the animal's size but about being carried by someone steady, or about the steady, protective side of yourself. He would also have asked what an elephant means to you before settling on anything.

Freud: the elephant in the room

Freud's central idea was that a dream disguises what you can't say outright. English has a phrase for a problem everyone sees and nobody mentions, the elephant in the room, so by his logic an elephant squeezed into your living room is a candidate for exactly that, the thing you've left unsaid. He would also start from yesterday, from a zoo visit, a documentary or a toy on a child's shelf, which he called day residue,^[8] and only then ask what wish or worry the elephant is standing in for.

Other readings

Artemidorus, a Greek dream interpreter of the 2nd century who traveled through Greece, Asia Minor and Italy gathering dreams and what came of them, used the elephant to show that local custom changes a dream's meaning.^[3] Seen anywhere but Italy or India, an elephant meant danger and fear, but in Italy it meant a master, a king or a very great man. One that carried you calmly was a sign of good things from such a person, one that hurt you a sign of harm from him, and one that chased you was often a sign of illness.

The spiritual meaning of elephants in dreams

Elephants in Hindu texts

The Brihadaranyaka, one of the oldest Upanishads, already lists being chased by an elephant among the frightening dreams, with being killed or falling into a pit, and treats them as the mind replaying at night terrors it met while awake.^[4] A chapter of the Sanskrit Agni Purana sorts dreams into good and bad, counts riding an elephant among the good ones, and names Ganapati (better known as Ganesha, the elephant-headed god people pray to at the start of anything new, from a wedding to an exam) among the gods to worship after a bad one.^[5]

The elephant in the Talmud

The Talmud, the great record of rabbinic debate, which gives three of its folios to dreams, reads an elephant in a dream as a sign of miracles, and several elephants as miracles upon miracles, a reading that rests on a play on the Hebrew words for elephant (pil) and wonders (pelaot).^[6] It also quotes an older teaching that calls the elephant a bad sign, and settles the matter in a very practical way: good if the elephant was saddled, bad if it wasn't.^[7]

Questions to ask about your elephant dream

Dreams borrow from what fills your days,^[1] so if you saw elephants on a trip or in a film, start there. Then go further with a few questions.

• Was the elephant calm, playful, chasing you or charging?
• Was it a baby, an adult or a whole herd?
• Where was it: in the wild, in a zoo or circus, in your home?
• Did it remind you of anyone, especially an older person in your family?
• What big thing in your life are you not talking about right now?

Oniri asks about your feelings and your week before it reads a dream, so a charging elephant at the door won't get the same answer as a gentle one in a forest.