Dreaming about
darkness

Most dreams are made of pictures, so a dream where the pictures go out is hard to forget. Dreaming of darkness usually points to uncertainty, a part of your life where you can't see the next step, or to a low stretch that has taken the color out of things. When something was waiting in that darkness, the dream turns toward fear, and often toward a side of yourself you'd rather not look at.

How you moved through the dark changes everything. Feeling your way along a wall is a different dream from sitting still and waiting for your eyes to adjust, and both differ from hearing someone breathe a few feet away. Whatever has been unclear in your waking life lately is the other half of the reading.

What dreaming of darkness means

Darkness takes away the sense we lean on most, and what remains is touch, sound and a lot of imagination, which is what fills a dark room with things that aren't there.

Not knowing what comes next

The commonest dark dream is about uncertainty. A diagnosis you're waiting on, a job that may not survive the next round of cuts, a relationship where you can't tell what the other person feels: each is a room with the lights off. English says you're "in the dark" when nobody has told you something, and the dream can be that phrase pictured.

A low stretch

Darkness also stands in for mood. If the dream felt heavy more than scary, and the dark seemed to go on forever, it may be showing how gray your days have been. An old phrase from Christian mysticism, the "dark night of the soul", is still how people describe a long period where nothing feels lit up.

What you'd rather not look at

The dark is also where the parts of yourself you disown can hide, the anger you don't admit to, the envy, the need you're embarrassed by. That would explain why the scariest part of a dark dream is so often what you can't see, and Jung's name for those parts comes up in the section on him below.

Dreaming of darkness all around you

Total darkness, where you can't see your own hand, is the purest version of the uncertain dream. Feeling your way forward means you're moving through the unknown anyway, which is a good sign, while freezing in place often matches a decision you've been putting off. Real eyes take around twenty minutes to adjust to the dark, and if shapes slowly appeared in your dream, the situation may be starting to make sense.

Dreaming about the prince of darkness

The prince of darkness is an old name for the devil, which Shakespeare used in King Lear and which the Bible echoes with its "rulers of the darkness of this world".^[3] Meeting him in a dream is usually about temptation or guilt, something you want and think you shouldn't, or a power too big to argue with (a boss, an addiction, a person who has a hold on you). If he was charming, notice what he was offering. There's more on the devil and on demons on their own pages.

Dreaming about someone in the dark

A presence you can hear or feel but not see is the most frightening dark dream, and also the most personal. Who did it feel like? Many people recognize a familiar weight, a parent's temper or an ex's silence, and the figure becomes less frightening once it has a name. If these dreams wake you night after night, there are practical ways to have fewer nightmares, and it's worth mentioning to a doctor.

Dreaming about being lost in the dark

Being lost at night, on a road with no lights or in a forest without a path, mixes darkness with being lost. It tends to come when you've lost your sense of direction in life, after a move, a breakup or a career that stopped making sense. Any small light in the dream (a window, a phone screen, a fire in the distance) often points to the one thing you still feel sure about.

Dreaming about darkness according to Jung and Freud

Jung: the shadow, taken literally

Jung's word for the part of yourself you've disowned was shadow, and he found it shows up in dreams as a figure you can't quite make out, often of your own sex.^[1] A dream where the lights go out and something stands just out of reach is that word at its most literal. His figures were people, so the step to a pitch-black room is ours.

Freud: a dream with the picture removed

Freud's method starts from what the dreamer can describe, and a dream of pure darkness hands him almost nothing, so he'd go at it sideways.^[4] What else was in the dream besides the dark, a sound of breathing or the feel of a wall? Which real dark did you meet the day before, a power cut or a late walk home? Since he held that a dream disguises its wish, a dream with the lights out is the disguise at its heaviest.

The biblical and spiritual meaning of darkness in dreams

Darkness in Genesis

The Bible opens in the dark. "Darkness was upon the face of the deep" before the first words of creation, and light is then separated from it.^[2] In that story darkness isn't evil, it's what everything is made from, and if your dream felt quiet more than threatening, that older picture of darkness as the place before something begins may fit better than fear.

Darkness in the Ramayana

In the Ramayana, Valmiki's Sanskrit epic of Rama, the prince Bharata wakes shaken from a dream of a fallen moon, a dried-up ocean and the earth covered as if by darkness, and takes it as an omen for his father.^[5] The epic bears him out, because it treats dreams as omens, which this page doesn't.

Questions to ask about your darkness dream

What you couldn't see matters, but so does what you did about it.

• Were you afraid, sad, calm or simply waiting?
• Did you move through the dark, or stay still?
• Was anyone or anything in there with you?
• Was there any light at all, and where did it come from?
• What in your life have you been kept in the dark about?

Oniri starts from answers like these too, which is why it asks before saying anything about the dark.