Dreaming About Goats

What people remember from a goat dream is seldom the whole animal. It is the horizontal pupil, the stare and the impression of something that will not be shifted, and the readings track that impression closely. Farm dream books, written where livestock was wealth, placed goats among the modest prosperity symbols: hardy stock that feeds a household on ground too poor for anything else. Beside that sits the goat as climber, sure-footed on rock where nothing else will go.

Thrift, footing and refusal

Those two strands supply most of the content. Read as thrift, the animal suggests getting by on little and doing it well. Read as footing, it points to a steep patch handled without drama. Refusal is the third note, and dreamers usually supply it themselves, since a goat that plants its feet and stares is one of the more comic pictures sleep produces. Readers then ask where in daily life something similar is going on.

Associations best left where they belong

Two heavy inheritances attach to this creature, and both are local rather than universal. The scapegoat comes from a specific ritual described in the Hebrew Bible and has since become an English idiom about blame. The horned devil of European painting is a later artistic convention with a history of its own. Neither one is a reading that fits every sleeper, and treating them as the meaning of the animal imports another culture's furniture into your night.

The dreamer decides

Anyone who keeps goats knows them as loud, curious, escape-prone company, and their dreams of goats are mostly about goats. A person who has only met one at a petting farm, or who was butted by one as a child, carries a different creature into sleep entirely. Begin from your own history with the animal and the tradition becomes a second opinion rather than a ruling.