Dreaming about
a camel

A camel can cross days of desert carrying a heavy load, then drink an enormous amount of water in a few minutes once it reaches some. That's the image most camel dreams are built on. Dreaming about a camel usually points to endurance, a long, dry stretch you're getting through on reserves, or a load you've been carrying without complaint for longer than you'd like.

What the camel did with you decides the reading. Riding one across the sand is about how you're coping with a long haul, while a camel buckling under its packs is about a limit coming close. Where it appeared counts too, since a camel in its own desert is a different dream from one wandering through your street.

What dreaming about a camel means

Camels have a reputation that's half true and half myth, and both halves end up in dreams.

Getting through on reserves

People still think a camel's hump is full of water. It's actually fat, a store of energy the camel can live on when there's nothing to eat. A camel dream often comes in a stretch when you're doing the same, living on stored-up strength through a tough period at work, a long illness in the family or a lonely patch. If the camel looked healthy, you probably have more left than you think.

A load you carry

Camels were the lorries of the desert for thousands of years, and in a dream the camel can stand for you as the one who carries things. "The straw that broke the camel's back" is the idiom for the small extra thing that's suddenly too much. If the load was growing as you watched, think about what's been added to your plate lately, and who keeps adding it.

Dreaming about riding a camel

Riding a camel is slow, swaying and high up, and it takes a while to trust. In a dream it's usually about a long project or journey you're committed to, one where speed isn't the point and patience is. Feeling seasick on its back suggests the process is uncomfortable even if it's going the right way. A smooth ride is the reassuring version, a sense that you're well carried.

Dreaming about a camel in the desert

A camel alone in a desert is a picture of a stretch with little comfort or support, and of being suited to it anyway. It often comes during a period that feels empty, after a breakup, a move or the end of a job. A caravan of camels, on the other hand, is about not crossing that desert alone, and if you were part of one, look at who's walking with you.

Dreaming about a camel attacking you

Camels are calm most of the time but can bite and kick hard when pushed too far, and what people call spitting is the camel bringing up the contents of its stomach. A camel turning on you is often about someone patient who has finally had enough, possibly you. If you'd been taking someone's endurance for granted, the dream may be pointing at them.

Dreaming about a camel collapsing

A camel that kneels and won't get up, or falls under its load, is about reaching the end of your reserves. It's one of the plainest messages a dream can give, and it's about how you are now. Take it as a sign to put something down, ask for help or rest before you're forced to.

Dreaming about a camel according to Jung and Freud

A camel is a carrier first, and that's where both men's ideas catch on it.

Jung: a helpful animal that bears you

Jung's essay on the mother archetype lets helpful animals of any kind stand for the mother, with the hare as its example.^[1] He never wrote about camels, so this stretches his idea by one animal. A camel is the helpful animal of the desert, built to bear you and your load across country that would kill you alone, and a camel dream can ask who has been doing that for you (a parent, a partner, a job that pays for everything). When the camel kneels and won't rise, the helper has reached its limit, and the question turns round to whoever has been loading it.

Freud: the wish to be relieved of the load

In Freud's account every dream pictures a wish as already granted.^[2] The wish in a camel dream may be the plainest one on offer, to have something else take the weight: the packs go on an animal that doesn't complain, and you walk beside it or ride. If so, the collapse and the kick are what the wish runs into, the thought that no carrier is endless. For Freud your own associations also outranked any fixed meaning, so a camel from a zoo visit, a holiday ride or a film says more than any list.

The biblical and spiritual meaning of a camel in dreams

Camels in the Bible

Two camel passages in the Bible are especially well known. In Genesis, Abraham's servant asks God for a sign, and Rebekah offers to water all ten of his camels, a long, heavy job she takes on unasked.^[4] In the Gospels, Jesus says it's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.^[3] One is about generous hard work, the other about what's impossible to squeeze through, and a camel dream that felt spiritual may lean toward one or the other.

Camels in the Agni Purana

One of the Sanskrit Puranas, the Agni Purana, gives a chapter to good and bad dream omens, addressed to a warrior-sage rather than the general reader. It lists riding a camel among the bad dreams, in a run of animals that includes the donkey, the pig and the dog.^[5] That pulls against the endurance reading above: for the text, a camel ridden is an omen, whatever the animal's stamina.

Questions to ask about your camel dream

The load and the landscape are the parts to look at first. A few questions help.

• Were you riding the camel, leading it, or watching it?
• What was it carrying, and how heavy did it look?
• Was it in a desert, or somewhere it didn't belong?
• What long, dry stretch are you getting through right now?

If you'd been traveling somewhere hot, or watched a film set in the desert, that may be where the camel came from.^[6] Oniri asks about things like that before it reads your dream.