A parrot in a dream: a calm reading

A parrot in a dream: a calm reading

Introduction

A parrot in waking life is a bird kept more for voice than for flight: feathers that please the eye, a beak that gives back what is thrown to it, a cage hung near a window like a small neighbor with an opinion. In a dream the giving-back becomes a question that touches the tongue before it touches the feathers: who speaks in my house with a voice that is not theirs? which sentence did the day hang until night memorized it? does the bird expose, keep, or mock with gentleness? People wake after hearing a green parrot in the kitchen repeat a departed grandmother’s phrase as she used to say it while chopping parsley, or after a parrot that stayed silent before guests and then cried a word that had been whispered in another room, or after a market where they bought a bird whose cage had no door and the bird still did not leave. This essay does not make every parrot slander, nor every mimicry a witness in a family court. It sits near the cage and asks: what did it say? in which tongue? whose voice did the sound resemble? and were the feathers bright, or plucked from the bird’s own breast? We set the parrot apart from other birds in this magazine. A pigeon is a message, a crow is an omen in some popular imaginations, a sparrow is lightness. A parrot is the manner of returned speech: talk without full understanding, or understanding sharper than we think, or the house’s tongue become public. Color changes the sitting: green is common in homes, blue is found strange, white is counted festival ornament in some markets. A cage is a manner of a limit. Flight in the room is a manner of speech that slipped. Silence when speech is asked is a manner; screaming when silence is asked is another. Pages that say “a parrot is a person who repeats your words” shorten the bird’s trade and leave the table: who was cooking, who was visiting, which device was open teaching the bird an advertisement instead of a verse. The feeling of a parrot differs among a teacher who dreams that his pupils have become parrots repeating the lesson without meaning, so that he laughs and then grieves, a wife who hears the neighbors’ parrot reciting her phone number, and a child at a birthday given a bird that says only the absent father’s name. Teaching is a manner. Neighborhood is a manner. Absence is a manner. We do not gather them under “unspoken feeling,” even if a contemporary paraphrase brings the meaning near a feeling or a position not declared. The approximation is a beginning. Manner is the beak, the cage, the sentence, the listeners. Write the sentence if you kept it. In this symbol the sentence is like the key in the symbol of the door. Without the sentence, “parrot” remains a poor word. Write also whether the bird was yours in the dream, or the market’s, or a mosque’s which it entered and then fell silent, for silence in God’s house is a manner other than silence in an office.

What heritage sources say

Attributed to Ibn Sirin, seeing a parrot differs according to its kind and its condition in the dream. Kind: familiar green or a rare color, large so that a child fears it or small so that it is carried on a finger. Condition: speaking or mute at the time of speech, plump or missing feathers, in a cage or on a shoulder, eating seed or eating what should not be eaten of the house’s paper. Difference is etiquette: there is no single ruling for the speaking bird. In what is ascribed to the animal chapters of interpretation, the tongue is considered: whoever returned good speech is not read as whoever returned an insult, and whoever returned remembrance is not read as whoever returned a market song. To cut that a parrot is always a gossiping enemy is excess. To cut that it is always glad news of eloquence is likewise a claim. Ibn Sirin — if the report of differing kind and condition is sound — calls you to feathers and voice before the glossary. Al-Nabulsi is associated with the remark that a parrot in a dream has several indications according to its color and its size. Color in the method of the interpreters is a garment of meaning: green may be brought near to a matter in which there is life or livelihood, white to clarity or to a grief dressed as ornament, black to heavy speech, without making feathers a fatwa of color. Size: a bird whose voice fills the room is not a bird heard only when you come close. Al-Nabulsi ties interpretation to what is intended by the action. Action with a parrot: teaching it, buying it, releasing it, slaughtering it — and slaughter is heavy, and we do not inflate it into unseen news — or hearing what you did not teach. Whoever taught Qur’an and the bird mixed it with a television advertisement has seen a manner of the age: the sacred sits beside noise. The sources may be silent about the screen. We say they were silent, and we read the mixing. A contemporary paraphrase says a parrot often reflects a feeling or a position not declared in waking life. The undeclared may be shyness, or backbiting returned in gatherings until it is memorized like a litany, or praise a mother repeats until the child is weary, or a manager’s promise that never grows past “we shall see.” In Ta’tir al-Anam a parrot is understood in a way that regards clarity and form, not the word alone. Clarity of voice: a plain word. Cloudedness of voice: hoarseness, mockery, an imitation that makes guests laugh at the owner of the house. Reminders about visions forbid cutting to the unseen. The bird is not a witness in court even if it uttered a name. The old books do not detail the office parrot kept for amusement, nor the stuffed bird in a shop window whose beak moves in the dream. Silence about the modern picture is etiquette. We translate the stuffed bird: speech without life, ornament for sale, a voice borrowed from the dreamer that startles him. Ibn Shahin and those with him look at an animal by what benefits or harms people in livelihood. A parrot in livelihood is ornament and voice and sometimes a price. In a vision the price is a manner: did you buy, were you given, or did you steal from the market cage? Theft is speech taken without right. A gift is speech placed in the house. Purchase is a living in which the cost of ornament is borne.

Context shifts

A married woman who hears the house parrot repeat her husband’s phrase in his absence is not read as an unmarried woman whom a suitor teaches a word, then finds the bird has announced it before her in a women’s sitting. The first dream may be a manner of the man’s presence in the house even while he is at work: a sentence the wall has grown used to. We do not make it proof of hidden surveillance. The second may be a manner of speech ahead of its time in a matter of betrothal. The marital context makes the beak the tongue of the house. Mend the speech you want the wall to memorize, because night may teach the bird what you repeat without noticing. A father who sees his son teaching the parrot the guests’ names, then the bird mistakes an uncle’s name so that the name becomes an insult without intent, is not like a son who sees his father’s parrot on the shoulder whispering what is not said at the table. In the first scene upbringing may slip in wording: the house teaches without knowing. In the second, the weight of grown secrets on a small ear may appear. The reading does not expose the father. It asks: is there by day speech above a chest of drawers that is overheard? Take the secret down from the shoulder. A schoolteacher who sees the class as parrots may be tired of repetition without understanding. The work is to vary the means, not to judge the pupils’ intelligence from feathers in a dream. A traveler buys, in the dream, a parrot from a harbor market, the cage has no door, and the bird does not fly. Purchase in a strange land is a new tongue: a language, a dialect, a promise of work. Having no door while the bird remains is a strange limit: formal freedom without movement. It may touch a post in which there is much talk and a narrow rank. Someone fearful of scandal hears the parrot scream after the guests have gone. Timing matters more than the word: the secret waited until the listeners left, then it left. This is etiquette if the word was counsel, and backbiting if the word was a fault. We do not name persons. We ask the dreamer: which sentence do you postpone until after the door? A woman who sees a parrot plucking the feathers of its breast on the sill during a quarrel in the room is not read as one who sees a bird being smoothed and given water after a reconciliation. Plucking is harm the house returns onto its symbolic body. This is not a skin diagnosis. We say: if the quarrel continues by day it harms even the ornament in the house. Reconciliation gives water. A pregnant woman hears a parrot return a word of praise of God and then mix it with an advertisement for nappies. Mixing the sacred and commerce is a manner of the age. Laugh if the chest is light, and order the house’s devices if noise is the bird’s true teacher in your waking life.

Common dream examples

A green parrot in the grandmother’s kitchen stands on the rim of a dish and repeats her sentence: “salt after boiling, not before,” in her voice, not the dreamer’s. The parsley is already chopped. The grandmother is not in the scene. Returned speech is a counsel of livelihood, not an unseen funeral. In waking life the woman was cooking for her husband’s family and fearing criticism. The dream brought the teacher of salt. The work: ask, if you wish, remaining aunts for a recipe, cook with gentleness, and do not make the bird a dead woman issuing rulings on salt. If the grandmother has recently died, hearing is longing. Longing is visited with charity and supplication, not with a summoning that wearies the heart. A man sits with guests and the office parrot — kept for ornament — is silent for hours, then when the guests rise it cries a word from a morning call about delayed wages. Faces in the dream do not turn; he turns. A cry after departure is postponed exposure or a conscience that speaks when listeners are safe. If he promised workers and the promise is late, the beak reminds of the promise, not of a plot. Mend the dealing by day. Do not slaughter the bird in interpretation. Whoever read this as “an enemy among the guests” mistook the timing: the guests had gone. The speech remained in the house. A woman buys from a grain market a blue parrot whose cage has no door. The seller smiles. She puts her finger on the empty threshold and the bird hops inside the wood as if it respected a limit that is not there. A cage without a door is the ornament of freedom. Hopping is commitment. By day she was offered media work: much speech, a contract without a clear guarantee. The vision did not command refusal. It described the shape: an exit without an exit. Read the contract, and ask about the real door: hours, wage, covering. Blue is the strangeness of ornament, not a fatwa of sea. A child at a feast has a cage opened, and the parrot says only the name of the father who works in another city, repeating until the guests weep from embarrassment, not from meaning. A repeated name is a need, not a denunciation. The mother in the dream covers the cage with a garment. Covering is a veil over an ache. In waking life a video call or a voice note is truer than an interpretation that says “the bird is envious.” Cover the cage if it hurts the feast, and do not cover the child’s need for the father’s voice. A man enters a mosque and sees a blue parrot on the window ledge, then it falls silent after it had been in the alley repeating a broken call to prayer. Silence in the mosque is the bird’s manners or the vision’s manners. A broken call in the alley is noise imitating worship. By day a phone raises Qur’an in a mechanical recitation between advertisements. Mend the house’s sound. Do not issue a ruling on the validity of prayer from a parrot. Be silent yourself where silence is due, and recite where recitation is due with etiquette. A shopkeeper sees in his window a stuffed parrot opening its beak in the dreamer’s own voice, asking for a discount. Customers laugh. A borrowed voice is livelihood mocking its owner: you taught the market how to bargain you down. In waking life review your pricing and your speech with the buyer. The stuffed bird is not a dead creature to be mourned; it is ornament without spirit. Do not buy an omen from a cloth beak on a screen.

Mistakes people make

The first mistake is to make every parrot a talebearer or an envious neighbor. Returning speech may be learning, or longing, or mockery of a manager’s sentence, or a kitchen counsel. Accusing neighbors from feathers is injustice. The second is turning the utterance of a name into a ruling on marriage, on a father’s absence, or on death. A name is a need or a memory or a device’s habit. The unseen is not extracted from a beak. The third is neglecting the sentence, the language, and the listeners. A parrot that says a verse is not a parrot that says a number, and not a parrot that mixes. People say “parrot” and move on. The fourth is teaching the house backbiting and then wondering if night memorized it. The bird in a vision is a pupil of the wall. The fifth is slaughtering the meaning: an interpretation that kills ornament because the dreamer feared the voice. Gentleness is to mend speech. The sixth is claiming that Ibn Sirin specified the color of your modern office. The sources speak of kind, condition, and color in general. Contemporary detail is a reading of manner, not an invented text.

Practical takeaway

If you saw a parrot, write the color and size, the cage or the shoulder or the window, the sentence in its letters if it remained, the language, who was listening, and when it spoke: before people, after they left, or in an empty kitchen. Then write your action: you taught, bought, covered, released, laughed, grew angry. Then look at your day: which speech do you repeat until the wall has it by heart? which promise? which longing? which device teaches the house? Sit with the vision if the bird spoke with etiquette: mend the tongue, complete the promise, join the absent one, lower the screen’s noise near what is recited. If it was silent where silence is liked, give thanks. If it exposed, cover in waking life and do not increase the scandal by interpretation. A parrot in a dream is a returned tongue and a manner of a state. Return the tongue to the speech of your day, and leave knowledge of what is hidden and what is announced to the One who knows the treachery of the eyes and what the breasts conceal. God knows best.