Ian Wallace Interpretation:
Dream: You are relaxing in your garden when you hear a rustling from the undergrowth. Branches are shaking and leaves are twitching and you realize that there is some type of wild animal out there. Although you can’t see the animal clearly, you feel it might harm you, so you try to get back to the house as quickly as you can. As you rush towards the door, the animal breaks cover and bounds after you. Even though you get back inside the house, the animal may get a paw through the door or bang against a window.
Meaning: When you dream about an animal in your garden you are usually reflecting on how you control your instinctive impulses in social situations. Your house symbolizes your self and as the garden is the area just beyond your immediate self, it often represents close friends and relationships you have cultivated. Like your friendships, the plants in the garden often grow naturally and blossom with their own rhythms. The undergrowth around the plants represents the unknown and unspoken areas in your relationships. These untamed parts of the garden show potential areas of growth in your connections with others. This dream indicates that you are picking up signs and clues that are making you wonder about your behaviour in your relationships. The wild animal represents the instinctive and impulsive part of yourself, which you try and contain in social settings with other people. The threat is that something in your immediate social environment will trigger instinctual impulses and cause you to act out of character and lose control. You are scared that if you can’t contain these instincts they will somehow compromise the identity that you present to other people. Rather than being an intrusion, it is an opportunity to rediscover the power of your innate strength and wisdom. This animal in the garden often represents your confidence and your power to assert yourself. Although you would like to tame and housetrain your instincts, sometimes you have to freely acknowledge their wisdom and energy.
Action: This dream is revealing that you are concerned about reacting too impulsively in a social situation. This can result, however, in you acting quite unnaturally when you are out and about with your friends and companions. Although this may seem safer and more socially acceptable to others, it also means that they are missing out on the wonderful richness and complexity of the real you. By giving yourself some space to connect with your true nature, you often find that you really begin to flourish and your social life starts to bloom.
Background: When we are children, the garden is often the first area that we experience outside the house. It opens up our awareness and is full of unfamiliar sights and sounds and smells. Although the garden can be well cultivated and cared for, being closer to nature takes us closer to our natural instincts and impulses. The garden has a natural rhythm with flowers and crops following natural cycles. Even though we refer to something as ‘common or garden’, it usually describes part of our innate nature rather than something unremarkable.