Why do we dream of crows?

The first step we take into a dream, we are unaware of dreaming. We look upon our surroundings without judgement. With our second and third steps, we think nothing of flying into rooms. Above doors. Looking through high windows. Transporting suddenly from one place to another.

By our fourth step, we are able to see ghosts and jinns, angels and demons. Look upon white orbs, beasts and birds. Whether it is as day or night or both at once we cannot tell. 

With our fifth step we can stand alongside family, friends and strangers, and we can speak to both the living and the dead. 

By our sixth step a story forms because we know as we dream that everything is united in our destiny. Even though what we may see and hear are only fragments. We move just as robins hop in and out from hedgerows. Nature loves to hide. 

A robin acts as a messenger from the spirit world in many traditions. In Celtic folklore, seeing a robin either in waking or in dreams means that a loved one is trying to contact us. Birds are thought of as our messengers in dreams and stories. 

But there is a messenger bird that can also bring gifts. A bird who asks us questions that other messenger birds fail to ask. It speaks as if nature speaks. This bird may come from the otherworld but can also bring messages from the singing bone-thickets of our own subconscious. 

Neither a dove; too clean, too biblical, a single leaf of hope or forgiveness in its beak. Nor even an owl inhabits the human psyche in this way. 

In Greek mythology, a little owl traditionally represents Athena, the goddess of wisdom. But actually it is a bird whose eyes and ears take up most of its head space. Though many people still think of an owl as wise, its acute senses dominate its brain. It is a limited form of messenger. Unlike the crow.

A crow mates for life. They live in large social groups. Crows will attack buzzards and other scavenger birds if they fly into the nesting territory. A group of crows is called a murder.

Images of crows are the mainstay of horror shows, the gothic trip of haunted graveyards. Crows are the death bird, black adornments against grey and white mists, yet just as often these same images of crows are used in graphic mindscapes to depict unbounded spiritual thinking. A warning, perhaps, to modern sensibilities. When cultural frameworks separate logic from lunacy, the crow’s message is one that shows how our modern realm of shared understandings can be broken and spiritually twisted out of shape. The crow’s presence is a crossroads, often involving fear. Fear during anticipation, fear of death, of the unseen, the strange and unknown.

In Celtic myth, the Morrígan took crow form to fly over battlefields and choose the fates of men. In Norse mythology, Odin’s ravens, Huginn (the mind and memory) and Muninn (thought and the more conscious will) soared across the world bearing secrets. 

Plus in countless Indigenous traditions, the crow is both trickster and truth-bringer. It laughs in riddles, but these utterings always point to revelation. It is not just a bearer of messages. It is a being in and of itself, a prophet of sorts. The crow speaks to us. What it asks us is important because speech is a psychic necessity for mankind. 

The crow’s caw sounds like a half-swallowed scream. It’s not like general birdsong, it’s a voice moved inwards. If that’s music then it’s clawed, scarred and real – more spell-work than song. Obscure and secret, like the alchemist and astronomer John Dee’s language of angels. Dee sought God. He was trying to navigate the universe. 

A crow is like the untamed take of a breath, and the knowing that we must breathe again howsoever controlled, for the spirit of the air must enter us repeatedly else we die. The knowing of laying down to sleep and that sleep will come with waiting, or the waiting at the threshold of waking from a dream, or that one day we will not wake. The crow is the bird of knowing. Of mortal self-consciousness.

There is a thin veil between life and death. The best sleep is the scavenger that picks upon the carcass of the day. Yet so many dreamers flinch from the crow’s grim silhouette, mistaking it for doom. Instead, it is the watcher of the shadow–kissed.

Perhaps because it is black; crow black; we fear it as we might our shadow selves. The crow is like Carl Jung’s shadow self of supressed emotions. 

For Jung, dreams were the expression of the unconscious, giving insights into the deeper, more universal patterns of shared human experience in nature. The dreamer’s seventh step, symbolising spiritual growth, introspection and the search for deeper understanding, is the final invocation of the sleeper’s journey. It is cloaked by darkness as all-consuming as true love. 

Many sleepwalk through nature’s dreamings as they sleepwalk through life. Ambling into forests, immune to the elements, unable to discern the edible from inedible. The future is not what it was since we’ve seen ourselves as separate from nature. Machines now haunt our dreams. But the crow’s cry is still a dark and powerful sound, the bird-blood-sibling of the dreaming soul itself that is calling out for more.

The crow reminds us that there is more to the forest, more to nature, more to us. In dreams, it is the embodiment of human insight. It is like our seventh sense. A reminder of the wild and unknown – and in this role it is a self-conscious knowledge of that intimate, intuitive memory implanted by nature, but that we so often choose to ignore. 

The crow is that inner voice that reminds us of our once waking lives of old; a realm where the world is huge and endless, where darkness can be infinite, and deep time stretches to a place where history doesn’t reach. Except that is still the truth, as any physicist will tell you. Dreaming with the crow you are simply remembering who you are in love, awe and wonder. 

The question that the crow voices, is this:

“What is my name?”

Answer that question to come home.