Octopus

Traditional interpretation

The octopus holds a singular place in the ancient dream bestiary for lacking a skeleton and for multiplying its points of contact with the world around it: Artemidorus of Daldis, in his Oneirocritica, groups the octopus among other boneless sea creatures and warns that its clinging grip, spread across several arms at once, foretold obstacles, delays, and affairs that tangle into one another before they can be resolved, a direct echo of the feeling of being held from several sides simultaneously. Centuries later, Victor Hugo fixed the modern Western image of the animal in Toilers of the Sea (1866), where the pieuvre pins its victim down by gripping arms, torso, and legs all at once, leaving no single point of attack to respond to, a scene that popularized the octopus as an emblem of a threat arriving from too many directions at the same time.

• Artemidorus of Daldis, Oneirocritica (The Interpretation of Dreams) (2nd century CE) — Agrupa al pulpo entre los animales marinos sin huesos; su agarre repartido entre varios brazos se leía como obstáculos y retrasos que se enredan entre sí.
• Victor Hugo, Les Travailleurs de la mer (Toilers of the Sea) (1866) — Fija la imagen occidental moderna del pulpo (la pieuvre) como criatura que sujeta a su víctima desde varios puntos a la vez, sin un único frente de ataque.

Psychological reading

Philosopher of biology Peter Godfrey-Smith, in Other Minds (2016), describes how each of the octopus's arms houses its own semi-autonomous nervous system, able to explore, decide, and act with relative independence from the central brain, as if the animal were several coordinated wills without one constant chain of command. Applied to a dream, an octopus can reflect the feeling of juggling several responsibilities, roles, or relationships at once, each one demanding attention on its own terms, none willing to yield to the others. G. William Domhoff's continuity hypothesis (2003) places this image among those that translate an everyday overload of simultaneous tasks directly into dream content, not a coded message about the future: the dream does not predict that you're about to lose control of a real situation, it describes how the dispersion across too many fronts feels right now.

• Peter Godfrey-Smith, Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness (2016) — Describe el sistema nervioso distribuido del pulpo, con cada brazo actuando con relativa autonomía respecto al cerebro central.
• G. William Domhoff, The Scientific Study of Dreams: Neural Networks, Cognitive Development, and Content Analysis (2003) — Hipótesis de la continuidad; sitúa las imágenes de dispersión entre varias tareas como reflejo de sobrecarga cotidiana, no de un mensaje sobre el futuro.

Variants

Frequently asked questions about dreaming of octopus