The other night I dreamed of two young pigs, which I don’t think I’ve ever done before. One was mostly black, the other mostly pink, and they were about two feet long. I’m first struck by the fact that there were two of them, since “twins” or doubles in dreams often represent something new coming into conscious awareness. This is reinforced by the fact that they were two feet long.
Pigs, for me, are complex symbols. They’re associated linguistically with gluttony, and are associated often with dirt and filth. Yet in the dream, they were more like pets, snuggling together on a bed taking a nap, so the gluttony and filth don’t create much of an “aha” for me.
Pigs are also highly intelligent animals, one of the most intelligent that we humans regularly raise for food. So they offer the complexity of being both pets in the dream and so representing unconditional love, but also potential food sources, which in a dream would symbolize non-physical nourishment. (For an interesting article on eating in dreams, see Jeremy Taylor’s post at Psychology Today http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-wisdom-your-dreams/201101/eating-in-dreams).
Archetypally, pigs are associated with abundance, growing from two-pound babies to 300-400 pound adults. The pigs in my dream are young, so perhaps represent abundance that isn’t yet in its fullness. According to the Taschen Book of Symbols, “The expeditious habits of the pig resemble the moral neutrality attributed to nature, for whom creativity and destruction, order and disorder are simply aspects of her eternal round.”
Perhaps my dream suggests that I need to come to peace with the paradox of living.
