Dream symbols · Animal · The Great Mother

Dragon

Read as primordial chaos and as the unconscious at full size, the mother complex in the form that has to be met rather than escaped. The fight with it is the standard image for winning consciousness, and the standard warning is that the hoard is always guarded.

Where the reading comes from

The dragon guards treasure in Germanic, Greek and Chinese sources alike, and in every one of them the treasure is unreachable without the fight. Jung read the recurrence across cultures that had no contact as evidence the image was being produced rather than borrowed.