Dragon

Capacity that has not been used yet. The Chinese dragon is not the fire-breathing creature of Western story. It governs water and weather, and stands for authority that is earned rather than seized. It is the only animal in the zodiac that no one has seen.

In the traditional vocabulary it is not read as a warning. Capacity that has not been used yet. The animal is treated as a description of a situation — usually involving timing or a person — not as a prediction. A dragon that stays in water and a dragon that rises are read differently: the first suggests capacity held in reserve, the second that the moment has arrived.

Classical texts associate the dragon with rain, with the emperor, and with a person's unspent potential. To dream of it is traditionally read as a comment on ambition — usually that the capacity is present but the situation has not called for it. It is grouped under Earth (土) in the five-element system.