Ferret Ermine Polecat

Inquisitiveness, sexual forcefulness that can injure another person’s feelings; the ability to ferret out things from the unconscious, but usually through force or fear or by denying other feelings. The ferret is a ferocious carnivore and so could easily be used to represent aggressiveness or forceful seeking of ones needs. It is also a great survivor, so can represent survival. The ermine was traditionally linked with virgin saints and thus purity.

The ferret is often kept as a pet, and is popular as such in USA. They are wonderfully inquisitive and playfull, so depending upon your associations with them can represent many things. See Being the Person or Thing

Example: I am standing in my wife’s garden. A ferret (one we had set free after trouble over them with neighbours – the ferrets belonged to my son) came down the garden to me. It was plump and healthy. I picked it up to look at it, and saw an enormous scar running the full length of its left side. I realised that although it had survived, and was well, it had been an incredible struggle, and was scarred for life. Then I realised that my son had hid the other ferrets somewhere. Patrick.

This example shows another side to the dream ferret entirely, and also illustrates how we personalise dream images. Patrick’s son had kept a female ferret as a pet and mated it so it had pups. The ferret, Blanche, was a very playful and loving animal, though prone to get excited and aggressive if food was around. One day Blanche and her babies escaped from their cage and attacked the neighbours chickens so Patrick hid them in his large building. They once more escaped from their enclosure and got under the floorboards of the multi-storey house. All but one of them were retrieved. But that one lived under the floorboards for six months, managing to survive somehow with water and food without being fed by Patrick. Patrick tried to humanly catch it in a cage, but although it entered the cage until it triggered the trap, it fought so enormously to get out it managed to escape from the metal cage. Patrick had to eventually poison it as it was beginning to gnaw electric cables. The ferret therefore became for Patrick a symbol of survival against enormous odds, so represented the great injuries he had sustained in his childhood and his survival of them. But also it showed his loving relationship and care for the natural and instinctive level existing in him during babyhood. It shows how, as an adult, he had listened to and cared for that instinctive life in him through working with his dreams. The hiding of the other ferrets expressed how Patrick hid this sensitive caring side of himself from others because he had been hurt enough in childhood, and was now suspicious of how others would deal with that side of himself.

Useful questions are:

What characteristics is your dream ferret displaying and how do they relate to your life?

In what context does the ferret appear? See: context.

What does the ferret communicate to you by its actions or behaviour?

What arises out of your relationship with the ferret?

See Animals – Associations Working With – Secrets of Power Dreaming – Edgar Cayce