Dreaming about
bats

Bats are among the most misunderstood animals around, blamed for vampires and haunted houses when most of them spend the night eating insects. They're the only mammals that can truly fly, and they find their way in total darkness by listening to echoes. Dreaming about bats usually draws on both sides of that reputation. It can point to something happening out of sight, like a worry you can't see clearly or a drain on your energy. Or it can be about the knack of finding your way when you can't see.

What the bat did is the first thing to look at. A single bat flitting past at dusk is a different dream from one tangled in your hair or biting your hand, and a whole cave of them is different again. And then there's you, because someone who finds bats fascinating and someone who can't bear the thought of one in the room won't have the same dream.

What dreaming about bats means

Bats live in the hours and places people avoid (the dark, the attic, the cave), and their dream meanings come from those habits. These are the main ones.

Something happening out of sight

Bats come out at the time of day when you can't see well, so they're a natural picture for a worry that only shows itself at night. It might be a feeling you push down during the day, a rumor you haven't been able to pin down, or a sense that something is going on behind your back. If the bat kept vanishing whenever you looked straight at it, the dream may be about something you can sense but can't name yet.

Something draining you

Vampire bats exist, though only three species of them, all in the Americas, and they mostly feed on cattle and birds. Even so, they've given every bat a reputation as a drinker of blood, and that's the second reading. A bat that clings, bites or feeds on you tends to point to a person, a job or a habit that takes more energy than it gives back. Ask who or what leaves you tired after every encounter.

Finding your way in the dark

There's a gentler side to bats too, and it's easy to miss. Bats fly through total darkness without hitting anything, and English gets it wrong with "blind as a bat", since bats can see. A calm dream of bats flying through the night, never touching anything, can be about trusting your instincts when the facts aren't clear, getting through a period of uncertainty on feel alone. In China the bat is a lucky animal, because the word for bat sounds like the word for good fortune.

Dreaming about bats flying around you

Bats circling your head are about distraction and unease, lots of small fast things you can't quite catch. Have your thoughts been swooping in faster than you can deal with them (English has "bats in the belfry" for exactly that)? These dreams often come in anxious periods, especially when sleep is short and the to-do list is long. If you stood still and they never touched you, the dream may be saying the worries are louder than they are dangerous.

Dreaming about a bat in your house

A bat that gets into the house is something wild in a private space, like a bird through an open window but more unsettling. It can stand for a worry that has come home with you, a work problem in the bedroom, a family conflict at the dinner table. Trying to chase it out, and failing, is a common version. If you managed to guide it gently out of a window, that tends to come when you're finding a calm way to deal with something intrusive.

Dreaming about a bat biting you

A bat bite brings the idea of being drained into sharp focus. It often points to a specific relationship where you feel used, or to a loss you didn't notice until later (money, time, goodwill). The vampire page goes further into dreams of having the life taken out of you. And if a real bat ever does bite you, see a doctor, since bats can carry rabies.

Dreaming about a bat in your hair

The old belief that bats fly into people's hair and get tangled there is a myth, since a bat's echoes tell it exactly where your head is. In a dream, a bat caught in your hair is about a worry that's got too close to let go of, something tangled up in your thoughts that you can't shake out. The panic of the dream tends to be bigger than the problem, just as the real bat is far more interested in avoiding you.

Dreaming about a cave full of bats

Walking into a cave lined with thousands of bats is one of the more striking bat dreams. A cave tends to stand for the unconscious or the hidden parts of a life, and the bats are everything that lives there unseen, in the darkness you rarely visit. If they stayed asleep, the dream may be about things you've left undisturbed for a long time. If they woke and poured out at you, it can mean a lot of old feelings are being stirred up at once.

Dreaming about a dead bat

A dead bat usually points to an ending, often a welcome one. A fear that used to keep you up, a person who drained you, a habit you've finally broken can all show up as a bat lying still. But if the dream felt sad, ask whether you've lost an instinct you used to trust, the part of you that could find its way in the dark.

Dreaming about bats according to Jung and Freud

Bats don't come up much in the classic dream books, but both men left ideas that fit a creature of the night.

Jung on bats

A creature that only comes out after dark is a good fit for what Jung called the shadow, everything about yourself you'd prefer stayed unlit.^[1] He never wrote about bats, so this is our reading through his lens. Seen that way, a bat dream nudges you toward feelings or traits you'd rather not own, and they're often less frightening up close. He'd ask what bats mean to you before reading anything into it.

Freud: a bat at dusk and a flutter mouse

Freud put your own associations and the day before ahead of any symbol,^[2] so he'd have started with where bats turned up in your life lately, a dusk walk or a vampire film. German calls a bat a Fledermaus, "flutter mouse", and Freud, who wrote in German, listed mice among the animals that stand for the genitals. That's our link, not his, and it's only worth a thought if the dream had that kind of charge.

Other readings

In his 2nd-century Greek dream book, the oldest to survive, Artemidorus put bats in with owls as night birds, and read the lot as idle for business and nothing to be afraid of.^[3] He made one exception: the bat alone, he said, is a good sign for pregnant women, because it bears live young and suckles them (a sharp bit of animal watching, since a bat is a mammal and not a bird).

The biblical and spiritual meaning of bats in dreams

Bats appear in one verse of Isaiah that's worth a look if your dream was about things you'd put away.

Bats in the Bible

In Isaiah, people throw their idols of silver and gold "to the moles and to the bats", into the dark places where nobody looks.^[4] In that picture bats are the keepers of what's been discarded, which fits a dream about things you've put away and forgotten.

Questions to ask about your bat dream

What the bat did is the key to the dream. Start there, then go through these questions while the details are fresh.

• How many bats were there, and where?
• Did they touch you, bite you or leave you alone?
• Were you afraid, curious or calm?
• Is there anything in your life happening out of sight right now?
• Who or what has been draining your energy lately?

Oniri asks for this kind of detail before it reads a dream, so a bat in one person's bedroom gets read differently from a bat in someone else's cave.