Dream Interpretation: What Your Dreams Mean

Look up a dream online and you'll usually find one of two answers. Dream dictionaries give every symbol a fixed meaning, so losing your teeth means money worries, or a fear of getting old, or a big change on the way, depending on which site you open. Skeptics say that dreams are noise from a sleeping brain and mean nothing at all. Dream interpretation, the practice of working out what a dream is about, sits somewhere between those two answers, and neither of them gets it quite right. Here's what your dreams can actually tell you, and how to read them without a dictionary deciding for you.

What is dream interpretation?#

Dream interpretation is the practice of linking what happens in a dream to the dreamer's waking life (their memories, worries, relationships and plans). People have done it for as long as they've written things down. In the ancient world a dream was often read as a message from the gods. And in the stories of Joseph and Daniel, the man who could read a king's dream ended up at the king's side. Around 1900, Freud turned it into psychology by arguing that dreams hide our wishes in disguise. Jung followed with the idea that they carry messages from the unconscious, and Jungian dream analysis is a good place to start if you're curious about the classic schools.

Modern research keeps one part of that old idea and drops the other. Dreams do say something about the dreamer, but what they say comes from the dreamer's own life, so no symbol means the same thing for everyone. Once you accept that, interpreting a dream stops being something you look up in a book and becomes a conversation with yourself about the week you've had.

Do dreams have meaning?#

If you've ever dreamed about a colleague you spoke to that afternoon, you already know part of the answer. In one study, people wrote down their dreams and then searched their own lives for where each part came from, and they found a source for 83% of them. When they could date the memory, 40% of the time it came from the day before.^[1] The rest reached further back, to the past month or the past year, and almost one in five went back more than a year.^[1] So a dream can easily put last Tuesday's meeting in your childhood kitchen.

The more time you spend on something while awake, the more of it turns up in your dreams. But the match isn't perfect, and some things we do for hours (reading and writing, for instance) barely show up at all.^[2] A dream takes your life apart and mixes the pieces, which is why it can feel familiar and absurd in the same breath. If you want to know why the brain does this in the first place, what happens to us during sleep and dreams covers the biology.

So yes, dreams have meaning. They're made of your life, your people and your worries. What the research doesn't back is the other kind of meaning, the coded message or the warning about what's coming. Dreams can't tell the future (the full story is in can dreams predict the future), and nobody has found a symbol that means the same thing to everyone.

Why dream dictionaries get dream meanings wrong#

A dream dictionary is the first thing most of us find, and it's easy to see the appeal, because you type in the symbol and get an answer in two seconds. But it gives every symbol one meaning, whoever you are. Teresa DeCicco, who runs a sleep and dream lab at Trent University in Canada, calls dream dictionaries inaccurate for exactly that reason. Her example is flying, one of the most common dreams in the world, which means one thing to a pilot and something else to someone who has never flown a plane.^[3]

Everyday images work the same way, so say you dreamed about a dying dog. Maybe you passed an old dog on your way home and your brain kept the picture, or maybe your own dog is sick and you're afraid of losing it. A dictionary has to pick one of those readings, and it has no way of knowing which dog you walked past, or whether you have a dog at all.

Her lab has followed that idea into real lives. People in addiction treatment who kept dreaming about the needles, bottles or pills that brought them there were more likely to relapse after rehab.^[3] It wasn't a certainty (plenty of people keep having those dreams for years after getting sober), but it's a far more useful reading of a dream than anything a dictionary could print.

Why we believe our dreams anyway#

If dictionaries are this unreliable, it's fair to ask why so many of us keep looking our dreams up. Many of us already believe our dreams know something we don't. University students in the US, South Korea and India were asked which of four theories about dreams was the most true, and in all three countries the favorite was the Freudian one, that dreams reveal hidden truths.^[4]

That belief changes what people do, even when the dream is only imagined. In the same research, people imagined the night before a flight they'd booked, and one of four things happening that night. A dream of the plane crashing put them off flying more than a waking thought about a crash, and more than a government warning of a high risk of a terrorist attack. It worried them about as much as a real crash on the same route.^[4] The authors, both psychologists, still noted the obvious with a straight face.

But people don't take every dream at face value, only the ones that agree with them. Across the same studies, how much a dream meant to someone depended on how well it fit what they already believed, about dreams, about the people they know and even about God.^[4] It's worth keeping in mind when a reading "clicks", because the one that feels right is often the one that tells you what you already thought.

What do common dreams mean?#

Some dreams come back for almost everyone, and they're the ones dream dictionaries are full of. In a survey of 1,181 Canadian university students, being chased was the most common dream of all, reported by 82% of them, with sex dreams second and falling third.^[5] Teeth falling out, one of the dreams people search for most, sits near the bottom of the list below.

Because these dreams are so common, a fixed meaning for each is even less likely to fit you, but they make good questions. If you're being chased, what have you been putting off? If you're late, or back at school failing an exam you passed years ago, where do you feel tested or behind right now? And if you're naked in public, where do you feel exposed? The posts on teeth falling out and being naked go into those two in detail, and there's more on the rest in the most common dreams and what they mean.

How to interpret a dream in 4 steps#

Asking questions of a dream is also what therapists do in a dream session, and a well-tested method comes from the psychologist Clara Hill. It moves in three stages: first you explore the dream, then you look for what it connects to in your life, and last you decide what to do about it.^[7] Here are the four steps to follow, alone or with someone else.

1. Write it down before it fades#

Dreams fade fast once you're up and moving, so record yours before you get out of bed, in your own words, with as much as you can remember. Don't tidy it into a story, because the odd details you're tempted to leave out are often the ones that lead somewhere.

Jodie Cook, Unsplash

A notebook by the bed works, and a dream journal app lets you do it by voice with your eyes half shut. If all you have most mornings is a scrap, these tips to remember more of your dreams help.

2. Start with the feeling, not the symbols#

Before you ask what anything means, ask how the dream felt (scared, relieved, embarrassed, strangely calm). Hill's first stage starts there too, with the dreamer telling the dream and saying how it felt.^[7] The feeling is usually the part that carries over from your waking life, even when the plot makes no sense. A dream about an exam you sat fifteen years ago can come with exactly the dread you feel before Monday's meeting.

3. Ask what each image reminds you of#

Now take the images one at a time and ask what they remind you of, instead of what they mean. The dog, the house, the woman you didn't recognize: what's the first thing that comes to mind, and when did you last see something like it? Start with yesterday, since that's where the largest share of dream material comes from, then go further back.^[1] A dream dictionary tries to do this step for you, but it's the one step it can't do.

4. Find the match in your life, then decide one thing#

By now a link usually shows up, like a chase that lines up with an email you haven't answered, or a flooded house with a move you're worried about. Say it in one sentence. Hill's method ends with a step most people skip, deciding what you want to do about it, and that can be as small as answering the email.^[7] Clara Hill's model walks through each stage in more depth, and the full guide on how to interpret your dreams has more exercises.

Does dream interpretation actually work?#

It does, as long as you judge it by what it does for you and not by whether it decodes the dream correctly. In one small study, 11 students each brought a dream to a group that worked through it with them for about an hour. Afterwards they rated their insight at more than 8 out of 9 on average, and what they'd learned about issues in their waking life at more than 7.^[7] Yet when the researchers went looking for real sources, only about 14% of the words in their dreams could be tied to something specific in the dreamer's life.^[7]

The researchers admit they can't tell where that insight came from, because the study had no comparison group. It could be the dream itself, or it could be an hour of talking about your life with people who listen.^[7] Honestly, for the person with the dream, that may not matter much. In an earlier study, the students who volunteered for a dream session were the ones already curious about their dreams.^[6] And when those clients were asked what helped most, they named three things (insight, links to waking life, and another person's input).^[6]

Sharing a dream helps the listener as well, because when people told someone a dream and talked it through, the listener came away feeling more empathy for the dreamer.^[8] The dreamer's own empathy for the listener didn't rise, so the gain goes to the person hearing the dream.

Priscilla Du Preez, Unsplash

So if you can, tell the dream to someone, a friend over coffee or a partner before work, and a therapist if it keeps bothering you (dreams still have a place in therapy). When nobody's around at 7am, an AI dream interpreter asks about your life before it gives you a reading, the way a good listener would. And Oniri keeps those readings next to your dreams, so after a few months you can see which images keep coming back.

The dictionary and the skeptic were both answering the question of what a symbol means. The question worth asking of last night's dream is smaller and more personal, and you're the only one who can answer it: what in my life right now feels like this?