Monkey

Cleverness applied to the wrong problem. The monkey is the ninth earthly branch and carries Metal. It is the trickster of the zodiac — quick, adaptable, and prone to solving things that did not need solving.

In the traditional vocabulary it is not read as a warning. Cleverness applied to the wrong problem. The animal is treated as a description of a situation — usually involving timing or a person — not as a prediction. Monkey dreams frequently involve the dreamer watching the monkey rather than being it, which traditional readings take as a comment on someone in the dreamer's circle.

Traditional readings are genuinely ambivalent. The monkey's intelligence is real, and so is its restlessness; the classical texts tend to warn about cleverness without an aim. It is grouped under Metal (金) in the five-element system.