Dreaming about
books

Books hold what someone knew, wrote down and wanted to keep, which makes them one of the easiest dream images to read and one of the hardest to pin down. Dreaming about books usually points to something you're trying to understand, like a question in your life you want an answer to. But it can also be about your own story, the chapter you're in and how you'd like it to go. We talk about lives as if they were books, after all (turning the page, closing a chapter, an open book).

Which reading fits depends on what the book was doing in the dream. A book you read easily and one whose words kept sliding off the page are opposite dreams, and writing a book is different again. If books are part of your job, or you fell asleep reading, the dream may also just be your day carried on, which is how dreams work with whatever fills our hours.^[1]

What dreaming about books means

A book stays closed until someone opens it. Then it says exactly the same thing to everyone who reads it, whether they're ten or ninety, which is more than any person can manage. Those two facts, privacy and fixed knowledge, run through most book dreams.

Something you want to know

The simplest book dream is about looking for an answer. You may be facing a decision, a health worry or a question about someone, and the dream gives you a book that should have the answer in it. Did you find the right page? If you did, you may know more than you think. If you couldn't, the answer might not be in any book, and only you can work it out.

Your own life story

People talk about "a new chapter", "turning the page" and "closing the book" on something, and a dream borrows the same idea. A book with your name on it, or one that tells your story, is about how you see your life so far. Were you near the beginning, the middle or the end? A dream like this often comes at a turning point, a birthday, a breakup or a move, when you're looking back at what you've written so far.

What you keep closed

English calls a private person "a closed book" and an honest one "an open book". A dream of a locked diary, a book you mustn't open or one someone snatched away is often about secrets, yours or someone else's. If you were the one hiding the book, ask what you'd rather nobody read about you right now.

Dreaming about reading a book

Reading a book in a dream is usually about taking something in, learning a skill, understanding a person or absorbing news. Reading calmly and enjoying it points to a curious, open stretch of your life. If you were reading for an exam or against a deadline, the dream is closer to a school or exam dream, about pressure to know enough in time. And what the book was about can matter, so a cookery book, a love story and a legal textbook are worth reading differently.

Dreaming about words changing as you read

This is one of the most common reading dreams. Its cause is plain. Reading is hard for the dreaming brain, so text tends to blur, shift or rewrite itself when you look away and back. Lucid dreamers use exactly that as a test, re-reading a line to check whether they're dreaming (there's more in the reality checks post). As a meaning, the dream is often about information you can't pin down, like instructions that keep changing or a person whose story keeps shifting.

Dreaming about writing a book

Writing a book is about putting something of yours into the world. It often comes when you want to say something important, tell your side of a story or make something that lasts. If the words flowed, you may feel ready to speak up (or at least to start a first draft). But a blank screen or a manuscript that kept getting lost points to something you can't yet put into words, often a feeling more than a plot.

Dreaming about a book with blank pages

Opening a book to find the pages empty is unsettling. You expected answers and got nothing. The dream tends to come when you feel unprepared, or when the person or institution you were counting on has nothing to tell you. It can also be hopeful, the unwritten part of your life, a future that's still yours to fill. Which feeling you woke with tells you which.

Dreaming about a library

A library is books on a scale you can't take in. Dreams of one are usually about how much there is to know, and how to find your way to the part you need. Wandering endless shelves points to feeling lost in information, perhaps too much advice or too many choices. Finding the exact book you wanted is the dream of a breakthrough. The library has its own page for the building and its silence.

Dreaming about being given a book

Being handed a book is being handed someone's idea of what you need, but the giver tells you most. A book from a parent can be guidance you're grateful for, or advice you never asked for. One from a stranger can be a new influence in your life. If you were giving a book to someone, think about what you're trying to teach them, or tell them without saying it.

Dreaming about books according to Jung and Freud

Books about dreams are almost as old as writing, and for much of the twentieth century American "dream books" paired each symbol with a number to bet on in the illegal numbers game. If you came here for that kind of book, it's worth knowing what the founders of dream psychology made of one.

Jung on books

Jung had little patience for fixed lists of dream symbols, and held that only the dreamer's own associations could settle what a dream meant.^[2] A dream of a book can be a fair warning about this page, too. The readings here are where to start, but if the book in your dream was a novel your father loved, that matters more than anything a dictionary says. His wise old man, who turns up as a teacher, a professor or any authority figure,^[3] gives a book that taught you something a second reading (ours, not his), since it may be speaking in that voice.

Freud: the book you read last night

Freud held that a dream takes much of its material from the day before, and a book you were reading, or fell asleep over, is about as plain a case of that as there is.^[4] He also wrote about the exam dream, where you sit a test you passed long ago, as a reassurance. So a dream of cramming from a textbook may be telling you, in his terms, that you've passed this kind of test before.

Other readings

Artemidorus, a 2nd-century AD Greek whose manual is the fullest dream book to survive from the ancient world, held that a book is the dreamer's own life, because people "go through" both, and that it also stands for the memory of the past.^[5] Of a letter he said that it holds as written if you can read it, and that one you can't read is a good sign, since every letter says "greetings".

The biblical and spiritual meaning of books in dreams

The Bible has one famous scene about taking words in.

The scroll in Ezekiel

In one of the strangest scenes in the Bible, Ezekiel is told to eat a scroll, and finds it as sweet as honey in his mouth.^[6] A spiritual reading of a book dream often starts there, with words you take inside yourself until they become part of you.

Questions to ask about your book dream

What the book was and what you did with it are where your meaning lives, so start with these:

• Were you reading, writing, searching for or hiding the book?
• Could you read the words, or did they blur and change?
• What was the book about, and whose was it?
• Is there a question in your life you're looking for an answer to?
• Which chapter of your life does this feel like?

Oniri asks you about the book and the week around it before giving a reading, so a lost textbook before an exam and a love letter tucked in a novel get read differently.