Dreaming about
chocolate

Chocolate is the treat people make deals with themselves about, whether that's one square after dinner, none on weekdays or the whole bar after a bad day. So dreaming about chocolate tends to come down to a pleasure you're allowing yourself or one you're holding back from. It can also be about affection, since chocolate is what people give each other on Valentine's Day and when they want to say sorry.

What decides it is what happened around the chocolate. Did you eat it freely, hide it, or have it handed to you by someone? A bar you shared with a friend and a bar you ate alone in the dark are two different dreams, but the feeling you woke up with (warm, guilty, a bit sick) usually tells you which one you had.

What dreaming about chocolate means

Few foods come with as many feelings attached as chocolate does. It's sold as comfort, as romance and as a reward, and it's usually eaten with a small side of guilt. Each of those gives a reading, and most chocolate dreams lean on one of them.

Comfort you've been missing

Chocolate is what a lot of us reach for when we feel low, and dreams know the habit. If you were eating it to feel better, or someone gave you some when you were upset, look for what you've needed comforting from lately. The dream may be telling you you've been running on empty, and that a small kindness would go a long way right now.

Love, given or hoped for

Victorian chocolate makers were already selling chocolates in heart-shaped boxes, and the link with romance never went away. A chocolate dream that involves another person is often about affection, how much you're getting, how much you'd like and whether it's coming from the right person. If the chocolate came from someone you don't expect it from, the dream may be about warmth you didn't know you wanted from them.

A pleasure you're rationing

Most people keep some kind of rule about chocolate, and dreams are where the rules get broken. If you've given something up (sugar, a person, a habit), a chocolate dream is often the wish getting through at night. It shows how much room the thing you gave up still takes in your head.

A reward with real value

Long before it was a sweet, chocolate was money. In the Aztec world cacao beans were used to pay for goods, and the drink made from them was bitter and kept for the wealthy. A dream of being handed chocolate as a prize, or of finding a stash of it, can be about wanting your effort to be paid in something you can actually enjoy.

Dreaming about eating chocolate

Eating chocolate is the commonest version, and how you ate it matters more than what kind it was. Slowly, with pleasure, it's a dream about letting yourself enjoy something. But eating it in secret, or so fast you barely tasted it, usually points to an appetite you feel you have to hide, and it may have nothing to do with food. If you're cutting down on sugar, the dream is most likely the simple version, because what we think about during the day is what we dream about at night.^[1]

Dreaming about being given chocolate

Being handed chocolate is about being cared for, and the giver matters most. A box from a partner is affection. One from an ex can be an apology you're still waiting for, or one you'd like to give. And a box where you couldn't tell which chocolate was which is the Forrest Gump line in picture form, a relationship or a choice whose contents you can't see yet.

Dreaming about chocolate cake

Chocolate cake is two treats in one, so a dream of it tends to be about indulgence that's been given permission. It often comes around a celebration where the usual rules are off. If you couldn't stop eating it, you may be overdoing something that started as a reward. The cake page covers birthday and wedding cakes in more detail.

Dreaming about melting chocolate

Chocolate melts just below the temperature of your mouth, which is why it softens in your hand if you hold it too long. A dream of melting chocolate is often about something good slipping away while you hesitate, like an offer, a mood or a chance to say something. But "melting" is also what we say when someone softens us. If the chocolate melted in a warm, pleasant way, the dream may be about your own guard coming down.

Dreaming about lots of chocolate

A room, a river or a whole factory of chocolate is the dream Roald Dahl wrote a book about, and it's mostly a dream of plenty. It can feel like a reward for a lean stretch. Did you feel sick by the end? Then it's about excess, the point where a good thing stops being good because there's too much of it, and it's worth asking where in your life that's happening.

Dreaming about hot chocolate

Hot chocolate belongs to childhood and to cold days, the cup someone makes you after you come in from the snow. A dream of it is usually about being looked after, or wanting to be. If you were making it for someone else, the dream may be about how much looking after you're doing.

Dreaming about chocolate according to Jung and Freud

Freud's best-known book has a dream about forbidden food in it, and Jung left an idea that fits a bar eaten in secret.

Jung: the one who eats the bar in the dark

In Jung's terms the shadow is the part of you that never made it into your self-image, made of the traits and appetites you won't own up to in daylight.^[2] Chocolate is a very ordinary place for one to hide, and that's our application, not something he wrote. The sensible you who counts squares at the table and the you who finishes the bar alone at midnight are the same person, and a dream of eating it behind a cupboard door, or of a stash only you know about, puts the second one on stage. Jung held that the shadow has to be acknowledged, not ignored, so the useful question is what the indulgent one is asking for, whether that's rest, sweetness or being let off, and whether you could give it to yourself in daylight.

Freud: Anna's strawberries

The Interpretation of Dreams builds its case for wish fulfilment on a child's dream. His daughter Anna, at nineteen months, had been kept from food for a day after being sick, and that night she called out in her sleep the foods she'd been refused, strawberries among them.^[3] To Freud this was a wish with no disguise at all, and a grown-up who dreams of chocolate after a day of dieting is having the same dream. Where the chocolate is odder (an empty box, a gift from an ex), he'd look first at what the previous day left lying around, a wrapper in the bin or an advert, and then at whatever the chocolate reminds you of, since your own associations came before any list.

Questions to ask about your chocolate dream

Your answers here matter more than any reading above, because they place the chocolate in your own life.

• Did you eat it, give it, receive it, or only look at it?
• Did you feel pleasure, guilt or a bit sick afterwards?
• Who were you with, or who were you hiding from?
• Is there something you've given up recently, or wish you could?
• Was there an occasion, a gift or a reward involved?

Oniri asks about the people and the feelings around the chocolate before giving a reading, so a dream about a gift and a dream about a binge get different answers.