Hindu tradition
Cow in Hindu dream interpretation
Favourable, and for a reason the texts do not have to explain to their own readers.
What this page is
What follows describes what these texts say about particular images, where they say it, and what the framework around them required. It is not a claim that a dream about any of these things means anything. The tradition is also not one thing: the Upanishadic material, the omen literature, the medical texts and the Vedic hymns disagree with each other about what a dream even is.
The cow appears among auspicious dream images across the omen material. Unlike most entries in such lists, the reason needs no reconstruction: the cow's standing in the tradition is established everywhere else in the same literature, in law, in ritual and in the value placed on the gift of one.
This makes it a useful case for seeing how the lists were built. The dream classification is downstream of the cultural position of the thing, not a separate discovery about dreams. An image that is auspicious to be near while awake is auspicious to see while asleep.
Which is also the reason these lists cannot simply be lifted. Read outside the tradition, an entry saying a cow is favourable carries almost none of the information it carried inside it.
What is actually recorded about dreaming of cow
Cattle produce two entirely separate report types depending on one variable: whether it is a herd or a bull. The herd is calm and largely without narrative; the bull is one of the more reliably frightening animals in the database.
The cow entrySources and reviewed references
1 reference. What these labels mean
- 1.Brihat Samhita, the chapter on dreamsReligious or philosophical text
Varahamihira (550)
Cited for: The classificatory approach of the omen literature: dreams sorted as auspicious or inauspicious, with the timing of the dream within the night bearing on it. Cited for the structure of the classification and for which images fall on which side of it.