Dreaming about
being cursed

Fairy tales run on curses. A princess pricks her finger and sleeps for a hundred years, a prince is turned into a frog, a whole kingdom falls under a spell because somebody wasn't invited to a christening. In those stories a curse always follows from something, an insult, a broken promise, a jealousy, and that's mostly how dreams use it. Dreaming about being cursed usually points to fear of the consequences of something you did, or to a pattern in your life that seems to repeat whatever you try.

It isn't a sign that someone has put a curse on you, since dreams are made by your own mind. What the curse did in the dream (made you sick, unlucky, ugly, frozen) and who you think cast it are the details that tell you what it's about.

What dreaming about being cursed means

Curse dreams come down to cause and effect, something done and something paid for, and they usually point to one of three situations.

Fear of what you set off

The most common reading is consequence. You made a decision, a confession or a break with someone, and part of you is braced for it to go wrong. The curse is the mind's picture of the price. Ask whether the curse in the dream matched anything you've done recently, and whether the punishment felt fair.

A pattern you can't shake

People often say "I'm cursed" about things that keep happening, like the same kind of partner, money that never lasts or a run of bad interviews. A dream curse can be that feeling made literal. If the curse seemed to follow you from place to place in the dream, look at what's been repeating in your life and whether part of you has stopped believing it can change.

Bad feeling between you and someone else

A curse needs someone to cast it, so these dreams are also about relationships. If you knew who cursed you, the dream may reflect tension with them, a sense that they wish you ill or resent you. Dreams pick up worries that fill the day, and a cold war with a colleague or a relative is exactly that kind of worry.^[1]

Dreaming about a family curse

A curse on your whole family, passed down through the generations, usually points to an inherited pattern (tempers, drinking, silence, a way of handling money or love). It can feel fated, which is why the dream reaches for a curse, but patterns are learned, and naming one is often the first step to stopping it with you.

Dreaming about cursing someone else

Casting a curse on someone, and maybe watching it come true, is often a dream about anger you haven't let out. It's not a sign you're a bad person, and it has no effect on the other person. It usually means you feel wronged by them and haven't said so, and if you felt guilty in the dream, the anger may be at odds with how much you care about them.

Dreaming about breaking a curse

Lifting a curse, by a kiss, a word, a sacrifice or a stroke of luck, is the hopeful end of these dreams. It often comes when you've started to step out of something that held you back, even if you haven't seen the change in daylight. If someone else broke it, think about who has been helping you lately.

Dreaming about a witch or a stranger cursing you

A curse from a stranger, often an old woman, a figure in black or a voice with no face, is a dream about a threat you can't name, like vague guilt or a feeling of being judged by people you don't know. Like the hooded figures in dreams of demons or ghosts, it's frightening but not a forecast, and when a stranger's curse is the reason you're awake at 3am, the advice on stopping nightmares works on it like any other bad dream.

Dreaming about being cursed according to Jung and Freud

A curse needs someone to cast it, and the two men read that someone differently.

Jung: the shadow that casts the curse

In Jung's thinking, whatever you've disowned in yourself makes up the shadow, and he found that dreams often hand it to someone else, an unknown figure of your own sex.^[2] The faceless old woman or the figure in black who casts the curse is a candidate, and so is the dream where you do the cursing. Both hold anger or resentment you've kept out of sight, said by a stranger in one and acted out by you in the other. That's his idea applied, since he didn't write about curses, and it fits best when the curse felt oddly personal.

Freud: a wish in a borrowed face

Freud held that a dream disguises what it's about in borrowed images, so the old woman with the spell may be wearing someone's face from your week.^[3] His claim that a dream carries a wish also gives the cursing dreams a harder edge. A curse that comes true on your sister is anger getting what it asked for, in a form you'd never say out loud. It's a feeling and not a plan, and it does nothing to the person it was aimed at.

The biblical and spiritual meaning of being cursed in dreams

A curse without a cause in Proverbs

The Bible has a short, reassuring line on curses. In Proverbs, a curse without a cause is compared to a wandering bird or a swallow in flight, which never lands.^[4] If your dream left you afraid that you'd been cursed for no reason, that's the tradition's own answer.

Questions to ask about your curse dream

A curse always has a cause and an effect, so ask about both.

• Who cast the curse, and why?
• What did the curse do to you?
• Did it feel deserved?
• Was it broken, and by whom?
• What in your life keeps going wrong in the same way?

Oniri asks who cast the curse and what it did before it reads the dream, because a guilty conscience and a family pattern need different answers.