Dreaming about
butterflies

A butterfly is one of the few animals people tend to wake up from smiling, which makes it easy to read the dream as simple good luck. Most butterfly dreams carry something more useful. Dreaming about butterflies usually points to a change you're in the middle of, or to something lovely in your life that you already know is short.

The detail decides which. A butterfly that lands on your hand is a different dream from a room full of them, and one you chase with a net isn't the same as one you find dead on a windowsill. What you felt in the dream (calm, delight, panic, sadness) matters as much as what the butterfly did, and so does what's been changing for you lately.

What dreaming about butterflies means

Of all the animals we grow up around, none changes as completely as a butterfly. Inside the chrysalis the caterpillar breaks most of its own body down into a kind of soup, then builds wings and legs from small clusters of cells it carried all along. The readings below all come from some part of that story, or from what happens after it.

A change you're going through

The most common reading is change, and in particular the stage nobody enjoys, where the old version of your life is gone and the new one isn't ready. People dream of butterflies when they're between jobs, cities or relationships, after a diagnosis, or after becoming parents. If the butterfly in your dream was still damp and unfolding its wings, you may be closer to the end of that stage than you feel. And if the dream kept showing you the cocoon, ask what you're waiting for.

Something lovely that won't last

Most adult butterflies live only a few weeks (the monarchs that fly to Mexico for the winter are the exception, and live for months). So a butterfly can stand for anything good and brief, like a summer, a holiday romance or the last months before a child starts school. A dream like this is rarely a warning, but more often you noticing, a little sadly, that you'd like this part to last longer.

Nerves before something new

English calls the fluttering feeling before a date, an interview or a stage "butterflies in your stomach", and dreams love a pun. Butterflies inside your body, in your mouth or swarming close to your chest often go with that excited, slightly sick feeling. Is something big coming up this week? Then the dream may be nothing more mysterious than your nerves, given wings.

The soul, in old belief

The Greek word psyche meant both the soul and a butterfly, and the idea that a butterfly carries a person's spirit turns up in many places. In Mexico, the monarchs arrive for the winter around the Day of the Dead, and many families there say they're the souls of the dead coming home. If you dreamed of a butterfly shortly after losing someone, the dream may be about them, and the post on dreams of ancestors goes further into that.

Dreaming that you're a butterfly

The most famous butterfly dream in history belongs to Zhuangzi, a Chinese philosopher who lived more than 2,000 years ago. He wrote that he dreamed he was a butterfly, flitting about happily, with no idea he was Zhuangzi. Then he woke up, plainly himself, and couldn't tell whether he was Zhuangzi who had dreamed of being a butterfly or a butterfly now dreaming it was Zhuangzi. He ends the story by saying there must be some difference between the two, and calls it "the transformation of things".^[2]

If you dreamed you were a butterfly yourself, the feeling of lightness is usually the point. It's a dream of being free of your usual self, its weight and its worries, for a while. And if the dream left you, like Zhuangzi, unsure for a moment which life was the real one, it can be a sign that the life you're living feels a bit borrowed right now.

Dreaming about a butterfly landing on you

In real life butterflies land on people for the salt in their sweat, which is less romantic than the dream feels. In the dream it usually reads as something good choosing you, like a chance, an attention you didn't ask for or a moment of peace. Where it landed can add to that. A butterfly on your hand is often about something you're about to do or make, and one on your head or face about an idea or a new way of seeing yourself. If you held still so it wouldn't fly off, ask what you're afraid of scaring away.

Dreaming about lots of butterflies

Every winter, millions of monarchs cover whole fir trees in the mountains of central Mexico, so thick that branches bend under them. A dream full of butterflies can feel like that, joy everywhere and more than you can take in. But a swarm is still a swarm, and if the butterflies were in your face, in your hair or trapped in a room with you, the dream is more likely about too many changes at once, each one small and harmless and together a bit much.

Dreaming about a dead butterfly

A dead butterfly tends to go with the end of something fragile, a plan, a friendship, a hope you'd been holding very carefully. It can also mean a change that stopped halfway, where you started becoming someone else and then went back. If you found it pressed in a book or pinned behind glass, think about something you tried to keep so tightly that it stopped being alive, a relationship you held on to or a moment you've replayed too often.

Dreaming about catching a butterfly

Chasing a butterfly with a net or cupping one in your hands is usually about wanting to hold on to something that, by its nature, moves. You may be trying to make a good time last, or to pin down a person who doesn't want to be pinned. Did it get away, or did you let it go? Victorian collectors kept butterflies by killing them and mounting them on cards, and a dream that ends with the butterfly in a jar can carry the same quiet question about what keeping something costs.

Dreaming about a caterpillar turning into a butterfly

Watching the whole change happen in a dream is about the process more than the result. If the butterfly came out and flew, you may already sense that a hard period is about to pay off. If it was stuck in the chrysalis, or came out with crumpled wings, look at where you feel rushed or unready. A dream of rebirth or of growing wings of your own is close kin to this one.

Dreaming about black or white butterflies

Color changes the mood more than the meaning (we all carry our own color code from childhood). A black butterfly, or a large dark moth, is linked with death or bad news in some folk traditions, so it tends to show up when you're grieving or worried. White butterflies usually feel calmer, closer to a fresh start or to someone you miss in a gentle way. Bright colors, such as the orange of a monarch or a blue morpho, go with joy and with being noticed. Your own link to the color comes first, so if your late mother loved yellow, that is the meaning of a yellow butterfly.

Dreaming about butterflies according to Jung and Freud

Butterflies aren't in the symbol lists either man left that this page draws on, so the sections below apply their methods and say so.

Jung: a butterfly and what's coming

Jung's own method was amplification, setting a dream image beside the myths and fairy tales that have gathered around it, and his advice was to ask what the image means to you before reaching for a dictionary.^[5] Plenty of stories have gathered around the butterfly (the Greek word psyche meant both soul and butterfly), and the section below sets out some of them. Jung's child archetype is the figure of what hasn't happened yet, of potential and a new beginning, and it fits a caterpillar turning into a butterfly well.^[6] Through it, a butterfly dream can be about a part of you that hasn't finished becoming itself.

Freud: the wish that flutters

Freud would start from yesterday, from a garden, a pattern on a dress or the butterflies you felt in your stomach before an interview, which he called day residue.^[4] After that comes the wish: what is the butterfly carrying? It is the one animal people hope will land on them, light, harmless and beautiful, so the wish could be for something delicate that stays, a person or a moment of ease. His symbol list has small animals standing for small children, which is a stretch for a butterfly, but if one landed on your hand and you thought of a child, yours or the one you were, that is where he would look.

The spiritual meaning of butterflies in dreams

The butterfly has a long history outside dream books. Beyond the double meaning of psyche, the Roman story of Cupid and Psyche turned the girl Psyche into a figure painters often gave butterfly wings, and Christian art later used the butterfly, with its caterpillar, chrysalis and flight, as a picture of resurrection. If your dream felt spiritual, those are the traditions behind that feeling.

Caterpillars in the Buddha's great dreams

The Anguttara Nikaya, the collection of numbered discourses in the early Buddhist canon, records five great dreams the Buddha had the night before his awakening. In the third, white caterpillars with black heads crawled up him as far as his knees, and the text says the dream came true when crowds of lay followers dressed in white came to him for refuge.^[3] It's the canon looking back after the fact, so it isn't a key for your own dream, but the caterpillars in it stand for people about to turn their lives around, which is close to what a caterpillar means to most of us.

Questions to ask about your butterfly dream

What a butterfly means in your dream depends on what's been changing for you, and since dreams tend to track what fills your days,^[1] it's worth going over the dream with a few questions.

• Were you watching the butterfly, chasing it, holding it or being it?
• Was it alive and flying, stuck, hurt or dead?
• Was it bright, pale or dark, and do you link that color with anyone?
• Did it remind you of someone, especially someone you've lost?
• What in your life is in the middle of becoming something else?

Before Oniri reads a dream, it asks you about your life and your feelings in the same way, so a butterfly on your hand gets read as your butterfly.