Dreaming about
a bed

Your bed is the one place where you're unguarded for hours at a time, so a dream about a bed tends to be about what you need to feel safe enough to rest. Some bed dreams are pure body (a full bladder, a jolt as you drift off, a blanket on the floor). Others are about rest, privacy and the people you let into your private life.

Which one you had usually shows in the details, since a bed you can't get out of, a bed full of bugs and a bed with a stranger in it point in different directions. The strangest bed dreams are the ones people search for most, so they get their own sections below.

What dreaming about a bed means

A bed is where you sleep, recover, make love, fall ill and sometimes hide from the day, and a dream can draw on any of them.

Rest you need or can't get

An inviting bed you can't reach, or one you lie down in and can't sleep, is often about tiredness you aren't allowing yourself, common in busy stretches. And if you dreamed you woke in your own bed, got up, then woke again for real, that's a false awakening.

Avoiding the day

Staying in bed is also how people hide from what's waiting outside, so if you knew you had to get up and couldn't, think of a task you've been putting off. Getting out of bed in a dream, especially after a struggle, tends to come when you're nearly ready to face it.

Who you let close

Beds are where intimacy happens, and dreams about sharing one are often about closeness more than sex. Someone you didn't invite can be an intrusion, a person who has gotten into your private life without asking, while sharing a bed comfortably is usually about trust.

Dreaming about bed bugs

Bed bugs are the most searched bed dream by far. They hide by day and feed on you while you rest, so in a dream they tend to stand for something small that drains you without your noticing, like a habit, a worry or a person who keeps asking for more than they return. They're hard to get rid of, so the dream often carries a problem that keeps coming back. But if you've just read about an outbreak, it may be that and nothing more.

Dreaming about a snake in your bed

A snake in your bed puts something you fear in the one place you should feel safe. It often points to someone close that you've started to distrust, or to worries about sex and intimacy. A snake hidden under the covers is a fear you've half noticed, one lying openly on the pillow one you've been staring at for a while.

Dreaming about wetting the bed

Dreams of hunting for a toilet and finally finding one are usually your body talking, with a full bladder turned into a search. In children, whose control at night is still developing, the body can follow the dream before they wake, and adults who wake up wet more than once should see a doctor, since it's treatable. When the dream is only about being caught having wet the bed, it's more likely about embarrassment.

Dreaming about falling out of bed

Feeling yourself fall just as you drop off, then jolting awake, is a hypnic jerk, a twitch most people get now and then, more often when overtired. Falling dreams are among the most widespread there are, and close to 74% of students in one large survey had had one.^[1] If you keep falling out of bed while acting out what you dream, tell a doctor, because the body is normally held still while you dream. As a dream, falling out of bed is about losing your safe place, often during a change at home.

Dreaming about someone else in your bed

Finding someone in your bed, an ex, a colleague or a stranger, is about closeness you didn't choose, or a person taking up more room in your life than you'd like. With an ex, it's often the past turning up where the present should be.

Dreaming about a bed according to Jung and Freud

Jung: the snake and the stranger

Jung read the serpent as a symbol of instinct and the unconscious, dangerous and healing at once.^[3] A snake under the covers puts that in the place where you're most vulnerable, so in his terms the dream is about an instinct or a fear that has reached your private space. A stranger asleep in your bed brings in his shadow, the disowned side of yourself, often an intruder of your own sex. Both are his ideas applied, since he never wrote about beds.

Freud: the wish to stay put

Freud listed snakes among the male symbols, so a snake in your bed is a sexual dream in his terms, one reading among several.^[4] He started from your associations and the day before, like a hotel bed or a sick relative's. For a bed you can't leave, his idea of the dream as a wish fits almost too well, since the wish is to stay where you are.

Other readings

In the surviving 2nd-century dream guide of the Greek diviner Artemidorus, the bed and its bedding stand for the dreamer's wife and whole way of life.^[5] He meant it as a forecast, which no dream is.

The biblical and spiritual meaning of a bed in dreams

The bed in the Gospel of John

In John, a man who has been ill for 38 years is told "Rise, take up thy bed, and walk".^[2] The bed he lay on goes with him when he gets up.

Questions to ask about your bed dream

Bed dreams can come from your body or your life, so check your body first.

• Did you wake up needing the bathroom, cold, or with a jolt?
• Whose bed was it, yours, a childhood one, a stranger's?
• Who else was in it, or under it?
• Did you want to stay in bed or get out?
• What in your private life feels intruded on lately?

Oniri asks questions like these first, because a bed dream after a long week and one after a betrayal call for different readings.