Dreaming about
aliens

Stories of lights in the sky and visitors from elsewhere are older than anyone can count, but the modern alien, the gray figure with big black eyes and the silver saucer, only took shape after the Second World War. In a few decades it moved into films, books and our dreams. Dreaming about aliens usually points to something new and unfamiliar coming into your life, to feeling like an outsider yourself, or to losing control to forces you don't understand.

The details of your own dream decide which of these it is. Watching a UFO hover over the town, being taken aboard a ship and finding that you were the alien all along are three very different dreams. And your feeling matters too, since some people wake from an alien dream thrilled and others shaken for the rest of the day.

What dreaming about aliens means

Aliens are the most foreign thing the mind can picture, a being from somewhere we've never been, with intentions we can't read.

Something new and unfamiliar

When something arrives in your life that you have no map for (a new job, a move to another country, a first baby, a diagnosis), the dream may cast it as a visitor from space. The aliens' arrival is the change itself. Notice whether they came in peace or not, because that's often how you feel about the change, under how you act about it.

Feeling like an outsider

"Alien" also means a foreigner, and feeling "alienated" means feeling cut off from the people around you. If you were the alien in the dream, or the only one who could see the aliens, the dream may be about not fitting in, like a stranger in your own life. It's a common dream after moving somewhere new, starting at a school where everyone already knows each other, or simply growing apart from your family. Do the people around you understand what you're trying to say?

Losing control

In most alien dreams, things are done to you while you lie or stand there helpless. You're watched, taken, examined, and you can't say no. That shape often lines up with situations where other people hold the power, like a hospital stay, a legal process or a workplace that's restructuring around you. The aliens are the system you can't argue with.

Curiosity and wonder

Not all alien dreams are frightening, and some are the opposite. Talking with friendly aliens, or being shown their ship, can be about curiosity, wanting to learn something completely different or meet people unlike you. If the dream felt like an adventure, it may be pointing toward a change you're ready for.

Dreaming about an alien invasion

An invasion is change on a big scale that you can't stop, such as a merger at work, a new partner moving into the family home, or a new technology everyone suddenly has to use. One theory says dreams like this let the mind rehearse threats while you sleep, and an invasion is a threat with no limits.^[2] What did you do? Fighting back points to resisting the change, hiding to waiting for it to pass, and joining the aliens to giving in to it, for better or worse.

Dreaming about alien abduction

Being taken from your bed, floated through a wall and examined on a table is the most famous alien dream, and it can feel completely real. Many abduction stories happen right at the edge of sleep and share the features of sleep paralysis, which is waking up unable to move, often with a sense of figures in the room and pressure on your chest. If that's what happened, it's frightening but harmless, and the sleep paralysis "demon" is the same experience with a different cast. If it keeps coming back, these ways to stop sleep paralysis can help, and so can a doctor. As a dream, an abduction often points to feeling taken over, by a relationship, a job or a family role, with no say in it.

Dreaming about seeing a UFO

A UFO hovering in the sky, too far to see clearly, is something you can sense coming without knowing what it is, like a change at work you've heard rumors about, a feeling you can't name yet or an idea that hasn't taken shape. If it was beautiful, you may be looking forward to it, and if everyone else ignored it, you may be the only one who has noticed.

Dreaming about talking to aliens

Talking with an alien is trying to understand someone very different from you, or to be understood by them. Did you speak the same language, or did you have to find another way? It's a common dream when you're dealing with a new culture, a teenager, or a partner whose world feels far from yours. What the alien said is worth writing down, since it's often a thought of your own in a stranger's mouth.

Dreaming about being an alien

Finding out in a dream that you're an alien, or that you came from another planet, is usually about feeling different. Sometimes that hurts, a sense of never quite fitting in. But sometimes it's a relief, as if you'd finally found the reason for it. If you were hiding your real form from everyone, ask what you hide about yourself in waking life.

Dreaming about aliens chasing you

A chase by aliens is a chase dream with something unknowable behind you. You're running from a change or a situation you don't understand, and part of the fear is that you can't tell what it wants. Turning to face your pursuer, if you can do it in the dream, often shows it to be smaller than it looked.

Dreaming about aliens according to Jung and Freud

The classic alien is a postwar image, so these readings are each man's method laid over it.

Jung: the disc and the stranger

Jung read circles, mandalas and other round, whole shapes as images of the Self, the personality we grow toward over a lifetime.^[1] A disc of light over the trees is round, whole and above you, so a UFO dream, read his way, is about wholeness hovering over an ordinary life, and the awe it brings is a longing for it. The visitors who step out of it fit his shadow, the disowned side, which likes to show up as an intruder or a stranger.^[1] A figure who knows your bedroom and looks nothing like you is how a part of you you've never met might turn up.

Freud: the day before, and being picked

Freud died in 1939, before the modern alien existed, but he thought a dream is made of the previous day plus a wish.^[4] Modern work backs the first half, since dreams borrow from what you've been watching and thinking about, and a sci-fi series the night before can be all it takes.^[3] For the wish, look at an abduction. You're singled out from everyone else, taken from your bed and examined by figures who give you their whole attention. Applied his way, the horror may be disguising a wish to be chosen, though only your own associations could confirm it.

Other readings

Antti Revonsuo, the Finnish psychologist and philosopher behind the threat simulation theory,^[2] went through 592 home dream reports with a colleague and found that most threats were realistic and personal, aimed at the dreamer and the people closest to them. Movie-style ones such as comets, space battles, vampires and aliens were the exception.^[5] That fits reading a dream alien as a costume for something nearer home.

Questions to ask about your alien dream

Aliens are a blank screen, so what you project onto them is the dream. These questions bring that out.

• Were the aliens friendly, hostile, or impossible to read?
• Were you watching, being taken, or the alien yourself?
• Did you watch or read anything about space or UFOs recently?
• What's new or unfamiliar in your life right now?
• Where do you feel like you don't belong, or have no control?

Tell Oniri which of these fits when you describe the dream, and it can tell an abduction that's really about a hospital stay from one that's really about a new job.