Dreaming about
your grandparents

Grandparents hold an odd position in most families, close enough to raise you for a summer and far enough from the daily rules to spoil you. Dreaming about your grandparents usually draws on that position. They stand for experience you can lean on, for the family line you come from, or for a kind of care that never asked you to earn it.

The grandparent in the dream rarely acts at random, though. One who gives you advice is a different dream from one who cooks for you in silence, and a grandmother who has died carries other weight again. Your own relationship with them, and what's going on in your life now, decide which reading fits.

What dreaming about your grandparents means

Grandparents have already done most of what you're facing (the first job, the children, the losses), which is where most of these dreams start.

Experience you can borrow

A grandparent who explains something in a dream, or simply nods at what you're doing, is often a picture of your own experience. You may know more about the problem in front of you than you think, because you've been here before in some form. Ask what they told you, and whether it sounds like something you'd say to a younger friend.

Where you come from

Grandparents are the oldest people most of us have known well, so they tend to carry the family's past: its language, its recipes, the town it left. Dreams about them often turn up around a birth, a wedding or a move, any moment when you're deciding what to keep from the family and what to leave.

Care without conditions

For plenty of people, a grandparent was the one adult who didn't need anything from them. If the dream was warm and slow, with food on the table or a lap to sit in, it may be pointing at how little of that you're getting now, and how much you'd like some.

Dreaming about your deceased grandparents

For many people a grandparent is the first death they live through, and the dreams can go on for years. Seeing someone who has died as alive again is one of the most common dreams there is, reported by 54.1% of the students in one large survey.^[2] These dreams usually belong to grief, and to what you never got to say. Our post on ancestral dreams looks at the spiritual traditions around them.

Dreaming about your grandmother

A grandmother in a dream tends to bring the domestic side of the past, the kitchen and the remedies, plus the rules she somehow got away with. If your mother and you don't always agree, a dream grandmother can be the softer version of the same figure, someone who mothers you without the friction. If she was ill or confused in the dream, look at whether you're worried about an older woman in your life, or about getting older yourself.

Dreaming about your grandfather

A grandfather who gave you directions, fixed something or told you a story is knowledge handed down, the voice you reach for when you can't find your own. One who was stern or disappointed is worth comparing with the judge in your own head.

Dreaming about your grandparents' house

The house is often the real subject. Dreams return to the smell of the hallway, the sofa under its plastic cover and a garden that seemed huge at six, which makes the house a stand-in for childhood itself. If it had been sold or was being emptied in the dream, you may be letting go of something larger than a building, a version of your family that has changed.

Dreaming about your grandparents according to Jung and Freud

Jung: the wise old man and the grandmother's kitchen

Jung's wise old man is an image that can take the form of a grandfather, a teacher, a doctor or any older authority.^[1] A dream grandfather who hands you an answer is that figure in its family clothes, and it's worth asking whether the answer was one you already had. For grandmothers, his list of mother symbols includes the oven, a garden, a spring and the cow, which sounds like an inventory of her house, from the stove to the vegetable patch.^[1] A dream where she feeds you can then be about mothering itself more than about her. The step from his list to her kitchen is ours.

Freud: the wish for one more visit

Freud's central claim was that a dream hands you a wish already fulfilled, and a dream that sets a dead grandmother back at her table is an easy one to read that way, the wish most people carry after a loss, filled in for a night. That doesn't make it any less about grief. He also held that the dreamer's own associations come before any rule, so what she was cooking and how old you felt in her kitchen are the first things to check.^[3]

Questions to ask about your grandparent dream

Your history with them shapes the dream more than any general meaning can. These questions narrow it down.

• Which grandparent was it, and were they alive or gone in real life?
• What were they doing, and did they say anything you remember?
• Were you a child in the dream, or the age you are now?
• What decision or change is in front of you this month?

Oniri asks about the person and the setting before it offers a reading, so a grandmother you adored and one you barely knew don't end up meaning the same thing.