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The variety of animals that people our dream life is greater than Noah ever knew. He only admitted real animals into the Ark. In our dreams fantastic animals that not even Walt Disney could conceive of are as likely to appear as the genuine species. Because we fear wild animals by archaic instinct, we create them from the stuff of our dreams whenever a threat to our safety rises from the depths of our unconscious mind. A hungry predatory beast is a highly dramatic representation of brute, destructive force.
The choice of the species is determined by many motives. It often falls on a bear on the war-path. Ferocious as it looks in most of dreams, the manner of death which it would inflict is seldom specified; the dreamer usually wakes up before the bear gets him.
This sudden waking is always the sign of unendurable tension. The bear is a real menace even though the menace is not described precisely. When the dreamer is asked what the bear would do to him, he is slightly bewildered. His first impulse is to say that the bear would eat him; then his knowledge of natural history emerges and he realizes that not being predatory animals, bears rarely feed on flesh. Immediately on this admission comes the thought: They are dangerous nevertheless, they have strong arms that crush the victims before their claws tear them to pieces. Indeed, “hugging like a bear” is an oft-used expression, more or less alluding to the destructive possibilities of embracing. However, nothing is illusory about the fear of bears in dreams; it is as real as if it concerned an actual encounter with an enraged bear, as if, at some time in the past, we had been devoured by a bear and dreaded the recurrence of that awful event.
Childhood memories play a great part in the genesis of such bear fantasies. We fear instinctively all big and powerful animals because they might devour us. Foolish