Dream of big cats: Tiger and Cheetah

I dreamed that I was standing in someones living room, I did not recognize it at all. I could sense that there were potentially other people by my side and a cheetah was also standing there with me. With the cheetah I felt an overwhelming sense of love, understanding, friendship and oneness, almost as if I was the cheetah, but I was not. Then all of the sudden a tiger appears about 3 feet away, in the living room with us. For some reason the tiger is sectioned off from the group. Seeing the tiger gives me a sense of interest and excitement. This is where the dream gets kind of odd. I begin to get a vague sense that the people with me are potentially biologists doing experiments, but it was such a vague feeling.

I think I hear one of the people saying something like "get him, catch him!", or something along those lines, referring to the tiger. Then the dream cut to a close up of the tiger and the cheetah on a beanbag chair or a futon, both laying down. The 2 animals seemed to be fusing or becoming one. Meaning, to me it actually looked like the tiger and the cheetah were physically fusing into one, while they layed together motionless. Then, either me or someone in the group says "look they're fusing!" Then the dream ended.

Some current background information on me: Currently, I just came back to my college campus to train for track and field. The training has been extremely intense and the sprinting competition has been very strong. Lately I have been pushing my mind and body to the breaking point. I have been draining myself mentally by constantly using my brain as a tool to work and train harder.

Thanks, hope this helps.

Because a dream appears from the personal, specific ground of the dreamer’s life, it would usually be best to have some additional general information about you and any other recent events in order to provide an accurate interpretation, but from what you’ve written, it looks like the recent intense track and field training is what your dream is indeed commenting on.

Generally speaking, dreams try to focus the ego’s attention on any attitude or belief etc. which might over time lead to an overly one-sided outlook and disrupt an overall balanced approach to life.

In addition, dreams use very specifically chosen images that in some way metaphorically describe the dreamer’s actual situation as based on analogies with outer objects, animals and people etc.

For example, wild animals usually symbolize energies that are still not totally mastered by the will.

Your dream starts off with you being in a living room that you don’t recognize at all.

So in effect you’re somewhere that “isn’t you” in a psychological sense, perhaps as related to your recent very intense training.

The vague other people probably represent a mix of your own inner abilities, traits, outlooks and skills etc. along with influences of outer people with their various ideas, beliefs, goals and attitudes etc. which of course influence you in many ways.

The dream clearly presents the cheetah as symbolizing an ideal connection with your own instinctive ground (you felt an overwhelming sense of love, understanding, friendship and oneness with the cheetah).

Maybe the cheetah somehow also mirrors the unique mix of your physical and emotional inner stock.

For example, cheetahs do not belong to the family of “big cats” such as lions, tigers, jaguars and leopards but of course have extraordinary abilities in “sprinting”.

Despite their smaller size, they’re able to take down medium and large animals such as impala, dwarf antelope, zebra and wild ass, so they are quite “successful” in their own way.

In contrast, tigers are enormous, fearsome animals with great strength as opposed to the cheetah.

Psychologically, they usually partly symbolize very dangerous and destructive drives that “need to be tamed”, so it could be that recently, you’ve been seized by very oversized emotions that are driving you, as you wrote, to push your mind and body to the breaking point.

Of course, this is not a healthy state of affairs but the dream also seems to imply that “thinking” about it and mastering it via the will won’t work (e.g. biologists want to do “experiments”).

Instead, the way out could apparently be to kind of “sleep on it” (cheetah and tiger asleep together) and to allow your maybe oversized ambitions etc. (as perhaps fuelled by an overly competitive milieu) to instinctively merge through feeling, innocence, spontaneity and love with your grounded abilities in order to become the “real you”.

That way, you could maybe gain successes that would provide a sense of satisfaction while maybe not any “gold medals” per se.

Approaching the current situation in this way apparently might mean that, while you can keep a fierce competitive determination alive (the cheetah), the “tiger” in you will have been tempered to a healthier degree regarding competition in general (fuses with the cheetah).

Anyway as mentioned, without knowing anything much about you, this interpretation might not fit your personal circumstances very well but I hope these ideas can be helpful in some way.

Please feel free to make any comments or to ask any questions that you may want to about this particular way of looking at your dream.