Dreaming about
dinosaurs

Most children go through a dinosaur phase, learning names like Stegosaurus and Triceratops before they can spell their own, and plenty of adults never quite leave it. So a dinosaur can turn up in anyone's dream, often after a film or a museum visit. But when it does, it tends to mean one of two things. Either you're facing a problem that feels far too big to fight, or something old that should be long gone (a habit, a rule, a way your family does things) is still walking around.

The dinosaur's behavior decides which reading fits. Being hunted by a T. rex is a different dream from watching a long-necked plant-eater graze over your garden fence, and finding a nest of eggs is different again. Your age plays a part too, since a child and a parent can dream the same dinosaur for very different reasons.

What dreaming about dinosaurs means

Dinosaurs have three features no other dream animal combines. They're enormous, they're extinct, and we only know them from bones and films. Each gives a reading.

A problem too big to take on

The first thing anyone notices about a dinosaur is its size, and a dream reaches for it when a worry has grown out of scale. It might be a debt, an illness in the family, or a workload that no amount of effort seems to dent. If you spent the dream hiding, look at what you've been hiding from. And if you managed to fight the dinosaur, the dream is telling you that you're further along than you think.

Something that should be extinct

Calling someone "a dinosaur" means they're stuck in another age, and a dream can mean it in exactly that sense. The dinosaur may be an old-fashioned boss or a rule at work nobody can explain. Often it's an attitude of your own that made sense twenty years ago and doesn't now. Dinosaurs died out because the world changed around them, which makes the dream a fair question about where you've stopped changing.

The past that comes back

Dinosaurs disappeared about 66 million years ago, and yet our films keep bringing them back, usually with a scientist who thought it was a good idea and a park that falls apart. If a dinosaur turned up in your present-day life, look for something buried that has returned. An old conflict with a sibling, an ex who got in touch, or a fear you thought you'd outgrown all fit.

Dreaming about being chased by a dinosaur

Of all the typical dreams, a chase comes top, with about four in five people remembering at least one.^[1] One theory says chase dreams let the brain rehearse escaping danger, and a dinosaur is the biggest predator your mind can find for the job.^[2] The thing to ask is what you're running from that feels both huge and ancient, often a pattern that runs through your family. Did you hide and keep still? Films taught a generation that a T. rex can't see you if you don't move (which was invented for the film), and the dream may be showing you a strategy you use when you're awake.

Dreaming about a T. rex

Tyrannosaurus rex means "tyrant lizard king", and the name is a good place to start. A T. rex in your dream is often a person who rules by force, like a boss who shouts or a parent whose moods decide the weather in the house. It can also be your own temper. And there's the joke everyone makes about its tiny arms, which suits a person with huge power and no ability to handle the small, delicate jobs.

Dreaming about dinosaurs in your house or your town

When a dinosaur walks down your street or stands in your kitchen, the old thing has come right into your present. The more ordinary the setting, the more personal the dream. A dinosaur in the house you live in now is often a family issue at home, while one in your office points to work. If nobody else in the dream reacted, you may be the only one who sees how big the problem is.

Dreaming about a friendly dinosaur

Not every dinosaur dream is a nightmare. Riding a dinosaur, feeding one, or walking beside a gentle giant with a long neck is often about strength you can use, or about a big, old part of you that you've made friends with. It's also a common dream when you're thinking about your childhood. If the dinosaur was a toy that came to life, that link is even stronger.

Dreaming about dinosaur eggs or a baby dinosaur

Eggs are about something that hasn't happened yet, and dinosaur eggs add an old twist. They point to an idea or a problem from the past that's about to hatch again. A baby dinosaur can be cute in the dream and still frightening to think about, because it will grow. Is there something small in your life right now that you can tell is going to get bigger?

Dreaming about dinosaur bones

Fossils are the past made solid, and digging up bones is going back over old history to see what's there. People often have this dream during therapy or after finding old letters and photos. If you put the skeleton together, you're making sense of something. If the bones were scattered, you're still collecting the pieces.

Dreaming about dinosaurs according to Jung and Freud

A dinosaur raises two questions for the founders of dream analysis, how deep it came from and what you saw of it yesterday.

Jung: a dinosaur from the lowest floor

In his own 1909 dream of a house, each floor was older than the one above it, ending in a cave with bones and broken pottery.^[3] Jung read the house as the mind, with the oldest and least personal layer at the bottom. Read through that idea (our application), a dinosaur belongs to the very deepest floor, the instincts we share with animals that lived long before us. A dinosaur dream can be one of those instincts, fear or hunger or rage, climbing up into the rooms you actually live in.

Freud: the film, the toy and the wish

Freud held that a dream is stitched from the leftovers of the day, which makes a dinosaur the easiest image of all to place, whether it came from a film, a museum trip or a toy on the stairs.^[5] Finding the source doesn't finish the job, in his view, because the dream picked this image out of everything you saw, and the question is why. His other idea, that the dream stages a wish in costume, suits the friendly dinosaur best, since riding one is a wish for the size and strength you don't have awake, handed over by a creature that could flatten anyone. Both applications are ours.

Questions to ask about your dinosaur dream

The film you watched, the toy on your child's floor and the problem you can't shift can all produce the same dinosaur, since dreams follow what fills your days, whether you're a child who loves dinosaurs or an adult who watched one film last night.^[4] It pays to ask a few things before you decide.

• Did you see dinosaurs in a film, a museum or a game the day before?
• Was the dinosaur hunting you, ignoring you, or friendly?
• Where was it: in the wild, or in your home, school or office?
• What in your life feels both very big and very old?
• Did you hide, run, fight or make friends with it?

These are the kind of details Oniri asks about before reading a dream, so your dinosaur gets read against your week and not a museum label. If dinosaur chases keep waking you, some practical ways to have fewer nightmares are a good start.