Dreaming about
apples

Few fruits carry as many stories as the apple, from the garden of Eden and Snow White to Newton under his tree and the apple on a teacher's desk. Dreaming about apples usually draws on those stories: temptation, knowledge and its cost, or simple health and a wish for more of it in your life. Most apple dreams are mild and pleasant, but the rotten and poisoned ones have their own message.

Was the apple crisp, rotten, picked from a tree or handed to you by a stranger? Each one leads somewhere else, and so does what's going on with you, especially anything you've been tempted by or anything you're waiting on to ripen.

What dreaming about apples means

Apples come with a lot of baggage, most of it from stories everybody knows. Each of the main readings below comes from one of them.

Temptation

The fruit in Eden is the first temptation in the Bible, and even though Genesis never says it was an apple,^[1] that's how most people picture it. A dream where you're offered an apple, or can't stop looking at one, often points to something you want and suspect you shouldn't have, like a person, a purchase or a shortcut at work. The page on Adam and Eve goes further into that story.

Knowledge

The tree in Eden was the tree of knowledge, and the apple that fell near Isaac Newton is the most famous image of a sudden idea. A dream of an apple falling, or of eating one and suddenly understanding something, can be about learning, a realization, or a truth you're about to face. Ask what you've been trying to figure out.

Health and the good things in life

An apple a day keeps the doctor away, and in dreams apples can be a nudge toward eating better, slowing down or spending more time outdoors, perhaps in a garden of your own. A bowl of fresh apples often appears when you're craving a simpler, healthier routine, or when something in your life is going well and you'd like more of it.

Dreaming about eating an apple

Eating an apple is the most common apple dream. If it was crisp and sweet, it usually points to enjoying something good, perhaps a reward you've earned or a new relationship. If you felt guilty while eating it, the temptation reading is stronger, and there may be something you've given in to. And if you only took one bite and stopped, ask what you started and didn't finish.

Dreaming about picking apples

Picking apples from a tree is a dream about harvest, collecting the results of effort you've put in over time. It often comes when a project, a degree or a long stretch of hard work is finally paying off. Apples you can't reach point to goals that feel just out of reach, and apples falling before you can catch them to chances you feel you're missing. An orchard in bloom is about promise, the early stage before anything has grown.

Dreaming about rotten apples

"One bad apple spoils the whole barrel" is the oldest reading of this dream. A rotten apple in a bowl of good ones often points to one person or one problem affecting everything around it, like a coworker poisoning the mood or a single lie spreading. If the apple looked perfect and was rotten inside, the dream may be about someone or something that isn't what it seems.

Dreaming about red or green apples

A red apple is the classic one, ripe and tempting, and it leans toward desire and love. Green apples are fresher and sharper, and they can point to something new, or something that isn't ready yet. If you were choosing between the two, the dream may be about a choice between the familiar and the new, or about one that feels like comparing apples and oranges.

Dreaming about being given an apple

Being handed an apple can be a gift or a trap. A child giving a teacher an apple is gratitude, and a friend offering you one is care. But in the Grimm brothers' Snow White, the queen in disguise hands over an apple that is poisoned on one side only, and a dream apple from a stranger can carry the same unease. Ask who gave it to you and whether you trusted them.

Dreaming about apples according to Jung and Freud

Jung: the orchard as mother

Jung's list of mother-archetype symbols, the images of whatever shelters and feeds us, includes the tree and the garden.^[4] An orchard is both at once. Read that way, picking apples in an orchard from your childhood is a dream about being fed by a person or a place, and about how much of that you still carry. Apples aren't on his list, so this is it carried over.

Freud: the apple tree in Faust

Freud tied apples to the breast. In The Interpretation of Dreams, a patient's thoughts about one dream led to the lines in Goethe's Faust where a man recalls climbing a tree to reach two fine apples, and Freud said there was no doubt what the apple tree and the apples meant: a bosom, in this case his childhood nurse's.^[3] Worth knowing if your apple dream felt sensual, or took you back to being small.

Other readings

Artemidorus, a 2nd-century Greek who collected dreams, and what came of them, from the diviners of the Mediterranean's markets and festivals, sorted apples by taste. He read sweet spring apples, seen or eaten, as a sign of much charm in love, since they were sacred to Aphrodite, and sour apples as a sign of quarrels, with quinces for grief.^[5] It's an old version of the red and green split above.

The biblical and spiritual meaning of apples in dreams

Apples in the Bible

Eden gets the fame, though Genesis names only "the fruit" (see Temptation above).^[1] The Bible's own apple is a gentler one. In the Psalms, the writer asks God to "keep me as the apple of the eye", the phrase English still uses for the person someone treasures most.^[2] A dream apple that felt precious, and not tempting, may belong to that second meaning.

Questions to ask about your apple dream

An apple can mean temptation or health, so a few questions help you tell which.

• Was the apple fresh, rotten, poisoned or unripe?
• Did you pick it, buy it, find it or get it from someone?
• Did eating it feel good, guilty or dangerous?
• What are you tempted by, or waiting for, right now?

Oniri asks about details like the giver and the bite before reading an apple dream, which is how two dreams of the same fruit end up with different answers.