Dreaming about
a chair

A chair is a place made for one person, which is why chairs in dreams so often turn out to be about people. Dreaming about a chair tends to be about your place, whether you have one in a group, at work or in your family, whether you're allowed to rest, and who used to sit in the chair that's now empty.

The detail decides it. A chair someone pulls out for you, one that breaks under you, a game of musical chairs and an empty chair at a holiday table all point somewhere different, and the kind of chair (a throne, a rocking chair, an office chair) adds its own shade.

What dreaming about a chair means

English hands out power in chairs. The person who runs a meeting is "the chair", a senior professor holds one and someone under pressure is in the hot seat, so a chair in a dream is rarely just furniture.

A pause you need

Sitting down in a dream, especially after running or searching, is often about needing a break. If a chair appeared just when you were exhausted, take the hint, and if someone offered you a seat, the dream may be about being ready to hear them out.

Your place in a group

Where you sat matters. At the head of the table, you have authority, or want it, and at the far end, or on a stool while everyone else had chairs, you feel less important. A "seat at the table" is how people describe being included in decisions, and chair dreams often come during a shake-up at work or a shift in who counts in a family.

Being sat down

Being told to "take a seat" can be kind or ominous, and most people know which from the voice. A dream where someone sits you down is often about a conversation you're expecting, or one you think you deserve.

Dreaming about an empty chair

An empty chair is the plainest picture of absence there is. Families leave a seat empty at holiday meals for someone who has died, and at the Passover table a cup is poured for the prophet Elijah, who is expected and never seen. Dreaming of a particular empty chair, a parent's armchair, a partner's place, is often about missing that person, whether they've died, moved away or drifted off. Sitting in it yourself can be about stepping into their role.

Dreaming about someone taking your chair

Coming back to find someone in your seat, or being left standing when the music stops in musical chairs, is about being replaced or left out. It tends to come when a new colleague, a parent's new partner or a new sibling has taken some of the attention you used to get. Whoever sat in your chair is usually the person to think about.

Dreaming about a broken chair

A chair that collapses under you is support that failed the moment you leaned on it, a person, a job, a plan. A wobbly chair you keep sitting in anyway is a situation you don't fully trust but haven't left, and the dream may be asking how long you'll keep testing it.

Dreaming about a rocking chair

A rocking chair moves without going anywhere. It's comfort and old age, grandparents on porches and babies rocked to sleep, and dreams of one are often about nostalgia or a wish to slow down. It can also picture worry, all motion and no progress.

Dreaming about a chair according to Jung and Freud

A chair is a place with an owner, so both men's ideas come down to whose seat it is.

Jung: a seat is a role

Persona was Jung's word for the part you play in front of others, with its mask, its clothes and its uniform,^[1] and a chair is how a role becomes a place, whether the head of the table or the seat you give up for someone else. Read his way, a chair someone else took or one that breaks under you is about a role that's lost or shaky. When the empty chair is a grandparent's armchair, as in one of the examples, it also belongs to the figure he called the wise old man, who can take the form of a grandfather or any other authority, and sitting in it is trying on that authority. He didn't write about chairs.

Freud: whose place at the table

In Freud's list, a king and queen stand for the dreamer's mother and father, while a prince or princess is the dreamer.^[2] His list stops there, but a throne, or the chair at the head of the table, is easy to read as a parent's seat. A dream where you sit in it, or find a parent in yours, is then about who holds which place in the family, and in his theory taking a parent's place is an old childhood wish.

Other readings

Fritz Perls, the German-born psychiatrist who founded Gestalt therapy with Laura Perls, had dreamers act out a dream rather than interpret it, and the classic tool for that is an empty chair.^[3] You imagine a person, or a part of yourself, sitting in it and speak to them out loud, then switch seats and answer as them.^[4] If your dream had an empty chair facing you, try it in your living room: say to the chair what you didn't get to say, then sit in it and notice what comes back.

Questions to ask about your chair dream

Chairs stand in for people, so the questions are mostly about who.

• Whose chair was it?
• Did you sit in it, or were you kept out?
• Who else was seated, and where?
• Was the chair comfortable, broken or empty?
• Where in your life do you feel you have, or don't have, a seat?

Oniri asks who sat where before it reads your dream, because a chair is almost always about a person.