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. 2011 Dec 21;3(1):1-17.
doi: 10.3390/insects3010001.

The Curious Connection Between Insects and Dreams

Barrett A Klein  1
Affiliations

The Curious Connection Between Insects and Dreams

Barrett A Klein. Insects. .

Abstract

A majority of humans spend their waking hours surrounded by insects, so it should be no surprise that insects also appear in humans' dreams as we sleep. Dreaming about insects has a peculiar history, marked by our desire to explain a dream's significance and by the tactic of evoking emotions by injecting insects in dream-related works of art, film, music, and literature. I surveyed a scattered literature for examples of insects in dreams, first from the practices of dream interpretation, psychiatry, and scientific study, then from fictional writings and popular culture, and finally in the etymology of entomology by highlighting insects with dream-inspired Latinate names. A wealth of insects in dreams, as documented clinically and culturally, attests to the perceived relevance of dreams and to the ubiquity of insects in our lives.

Keywords: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; Lewis Carroll; Sigmund Freud; The Metamorphosis; cultural entomology; dream interpretation; dreams; entomophobia; ethnoentomology; psychoanalysis.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Insects in surrealist dreamscapes. Several dreams depicted in Max Ernst’s book of collages Rêve d'une petite fille qui voulut entrer au Carmel (Dream of a little girl who wanted to join the Carmelite order, 1930) portray insects, including … Hoppla! Hoppla! … (left; reproduced with permission from V.G. Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Germany, 2011); A bee buzzes by a dreamer’s ear in Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening (right; Salvador Dalí, 1944, reproduced with permission from Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí/V.G. Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Germany, 2011).
Figure 2
Figure 2
John Tenniel illustrated the Caterpillar (left) for Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and the Rocking-horse-fly, the Snap-dragon-fly, and the Bread-and-butter-fly (right) for Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Ralph Steadman produced this cover illustration after John Tenniel, who refused to illustrate the Wasp in a Wig episode of Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. Smithsonian magazine printed the unpublished galleys and several attempts to visualize what Tenniel purported was “altogether beyond the appliances of art.” Cover illustration reproduced with permission from Ralph Steadman.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis has crept into many crevices of popular culture. Peter Kuper adapted Kafka’s novella into a graphic novel (left). Edward Watson played Gregor Samsa in Arthur Pita’s stage production in The Linbury Studio, United Kingdom (center). A music band based in Virginia, USA adopted the name Gregor Samsa (right). Cover, photograph, and graphic design reproduced with permission from Peter Kuper [65], Alastair Muir [66], and Oliver Hummel [67].
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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