What Does Dreaming About a Hyena Mean?

Psychologically, the hyena carries a cluster of mostly cautionary meanings, sharpened by its eerie, cackling 'laugh.' Most distinctively, that laugh touches mockery and ridicule — a sense of being laughed at, mocked, or ridiculed, or a cruel, mocking laughter around you. The 'laughing' hyena can mirror feeling the target of derision, or an unsettling, hollow laughter that isn't kind.

It carries related charges. As cunning and opportunism, the hyena is a clever, resourceful scavenger and hunter — touching cunning, slyness, opportunism, and taking advantage (scavenging what others leave, or circling to profit). As the pack and ganging up, hyenas hunt and operate in packs — touching pack mentality, ganging up, or being set upon by a group. As a survivalist edge, the hyena's tough, adaptable, do-what-it-takes survival touches a cunning, even ruthless, survival instinct. The hyena is widely cast as a sly, opportunistic, and somewhat sinister figure. Whether the hyena laughs mockingly, scavenges, circles opportunistically, hunts in a pack, or threatens usually mirrors mockery and ridicule (being laughed at), cunning and opportunism, the pack ganging up, and a sly, survivalist, taking-advantage edge.

A Freudian reading would attend to the hyena as the sly, laughing scavenger — cunning, opportunistic, and marked by its unsettling laugh, evoking mockery, the sly taking of advantage, and the pack's ganging-up. The hyena can embody the mocking, derisive impulse, the cunning opportunism, and the unsettling, hollow laughter that derides.

Its laugh and its scavenging carry the charge of mockery and of sly opportunism. What the hyena evokes — the sting of its mocking laugh, the unease of its cunning, the threat of its pack — tends to point at the dreamer's relationship to ridicule and opportunism: the fear of being mocked and laughed at, the sly opportunism (one's own or others'), and the ganging-up of the pack that derides and takes advantage.

While the hyena's place in Scripture is debated (some renderings count it among the wild creatures of desolate, ruined places, the 'wild beasts of the islands' that cry in forsaken palaces), it sits among the creatures of waste and desolation; and its mockery touches the tradition's theme of the 'scornful' and the derision to be risen above ('blessed is the man... that sitteth not in the seat of the scornful'). The hyena touches this theme of the desolate wild and of mockery and scorn.

A hyena dream, read this way, can touch mockery, scorn, opportunism, or the desolate. A biblical sensibility might weigh the hyena as a creature of waste places and an image of mockery and scorn — reading it alongside the blessing on the one who does not sit 'in the seat of the scornful,' a prompt to rise above derision and mockery (whether received or joined in), and not to be drawn into the scornful, opportunistic, scavenging spirit the hyena represents.

In Islamic tradition the hyena (dabu') is a known creature (with some specific rulings noted regarding it), generally regarded as a cunning, scavenging animal to be wary of; more broadly it touches the themes of cunning opportunism and the mockery and scorn the tradition warns against (ridiculing others strongly discouraged). The hyena evokes cunning opportunism and a caution about mockery.

A hyena dream, in this frame, might point to mockery or ridicule, cunning opportunists, the pack ganging up, or a sly, taking-advantage edge. Held with humility, it can invite a wariness of cunning opportunism and of mockery (both received and the temptation to mock others, which the tradition warns against), the keeping of honest and dignified conduct rather than sly scavenging, and a steady heart that rises above derision, met with patience and trust rather than being drawn into the scornful or opportunistic.

In a Hindu frame the hyena evokes the cunning, scavenging, and somewhat sinister creature of the wild — touching the themes of cunning and opportunism, the scavenging that takes advantage, and the mockery of its laugh; it sits among the lower, more tamasic (dark, opportunistic) energies to be met with awareness. The hyena evokes cunning opportunism, scavenging, and mockery, among the lower energies.

A hyena dream, in this frame, can point to mockery or ridicule, cunning opportunists, the pack, or a sly, survivalist edge. The tradition's note attends to awareness of the lower and cunning: the hyena as an image of cunning, opportunistic, scavenging energy and mocking derision — an invitation to recognize and rise above such energies (whether met in others or tempted within oneself), to dignity and honest conduct over sly scavenging, and to a steady awareness that is not shaken by mockery or drawn into the opportunistic and scornful.