Dreaming about
home

Home is one of the first things a child learns to draw, a square with a triangle on top and smoke rising from the chimney, and it never quite leaves our dreams after that. Dreaming about home is usually about belonging, about where you feel safe, who you feel safe with, and whether that place still exists for you. That's what sets it apart from a dream about a house, which is often about the building itself. A home dream is about the feeling of being where you fit, or of no longer fitting.

So the details decide the reading. Going back to the home you grew up in is a different dream from losing the one you live in now, and a stranger forcing the door at night says something a quiet evening in your old kitchen doesn't. Who was there counts as much as the walls, and so does what has been moving in your life lately (a move, a breakup, a parent getting older).

What dreaming about home means

Home is the place where we stop performing, the place we measure every other place against, and for many of us a place that exists now only in memory. Each of those gives a reading.

Somewhere you can drop your guard

At home you take your shoes off and stop watching how you come across, and many home dreams arrive when you've had no such place for a while. If you dreamed of curling up on a sofa you know by heart, ask where in your waking week you get to be off duty. Is there a room, a person or an hour where nobody needs anything from you? A long trip, a demanding job or a shared flat where you never feel alone can all send you home at night.

Who you were before

The word nostalgia was coined in 1688 by a Swiss medical student, Johannes Hofer, for the homesickness that made Swiss soldiers ill far from their valleys. He treated it as a disease, and the feeling he described is what most childhood-home dreams carry. They come when you miss something that home stood for, like being looked after or having time, more than the building itself.

Roots pulled up or put down

Moving is stressful even when you want it, and our dreams follow what we spend our days on.^[1] If you're between homes, house hunting, or leaving a place you've known for years, dreams of home are your mind sorting out where you belong now. And they can feel sad even when the move is a happy one, which surprises people.

Dreaming about your childhood home

This is the most searched home dream, and most people describe the same strange detail: the house is right but slightly off, with an extra room, a door where there was a wall, or furniture from a later flat. That mix tells you the dream isn't really about the past. It's about the present using the oldest setting it has. Thomas Wolfe titled a novel You Can't Go Home Again, and the dream lets you try anyway. Notice whether being back felt warm or trapping, because a childhood home you couldn't leave in the dream often points to an old family pattern you've caught yourself repeating.

Dreaming about going home

The dream of traveling home and never arriving is common, with trains that go the wrong way and streets that won't lead to your door. It often comes when you're trying to get back to a part of your life that has changed (a friendship, a sense of calm, the version of you from before a hard year). And if you did arrive and it felt right, the dream is usually about relief, the sense that something in your life has settled after a stretch of being lost.

Dreaming about a home invasion

A stranger breaking in is the frightening side of the home dream, and it's searched almost as often as the childhood home. The intruder is something crossing a line into a space you thought was yours: a boss messaging at midnight, a relative who comments on everything, a worry that has got into your evenings. Were you hiding, fighting or calling for help? Hiding points to avoiding the thing, while fighting means you're readier to deal with it than you think.

Dreaming about being robbed at home

A burglary that happened while you were out is less about threat and more about loss. Ask what was taken, because people dream of losing the ring, the laptop or the photo albums for very different reasons. A dream where nothing of value is missing but the place feels spoiled is usually about trust, a sense that someone close has been where they shouldn't.

Dreaming about a new home

A new home is usually a new chapter, and how the place looked tells you how you feel about it. Bright, empty rooms tend to mean hope and a fresh start. A new home that turns out cramped, damp or full of someone else's things points to doubts about a choice you've made, or one you're about to make. And if you aren't moving at all, look for what else is new (a relationship, a job, a body that has changed).

Dreaming of home and your mother

People search this pairing, and for many of us the two are hard to pull apart. A dream where your mother is waiting at home, or where home is simply wherever she was, often comes when you need care or are giving a lot of it. If she has died, the dream can be a way of visiting both at once. And if your relationship with her is difficult, home may feel tense in the dream for the same reason.

Dreaming about losing your home

Losing your home to a fire, an eviction or a flood is the dream of having nowhere to land. It often follows a real loss of footing, such as a job ending, a relationship breaking up or money getting tight. But it can also come with a change you chose, when the old life is gone before the new one feels like yours. What you saved, or tried to save, is worth noting, because that's usually what you're most afraid of losing now.

Dreaming about home according to Jung and Freud

Jung wrote about a house and Freud's lists have rooms in them, so both have something to say about a home.

Jung on the house as a map of the mind

For Jung a dream house mapped the dreamer's own mind, an idea he took from a 1909 dream in which each floor he went down was older than the last, until he reached a cave of bones under the cellar.^[2] A home dream adds belonging to that map. He also named the city and the country as mother symbols, places that hold and feed us the way a mother does,^[3] which puts home close to the question of who looked after you and who you look after now.

Freud on rooms and parents

Freud wrote that rooms in dreams stand for women, and that a king and queen stand for the dreamer's parents.^[4] Neither is about homes, so this is our application of his lists, and for the house you grew up in it comes down to which room you were in and who was in it. He also wanted the leftovers of the previous day (a call from your mother, a house listing), and arriving home at last, after the wrong trains and the streets that wouldn't lead to your door, is as easy a wish to spot as there is.

Other readings

Ernest Hartmann, a sleep researcher and psychiatrist from Vienna who worked at Tufts University in the US, reported that in the week after their mothers died, two women dreamt of an empty, barren house with doors and windows open and the wind blowing through.^[5] Another case he described was a woman who barely escaped a fire, dreamt for weeks of fires and then, over the following year, of building new houses and adding rooms.^[5] Neville Goddard, a teacher of the mid-1900s who taught that imagination creates reality, prescribed revision for a dream of losing what you want, which means replaying the scene before sleep with the ending you wanted, and keeping at it until it feels real.^[6]

Questions to ask about your home dream

The home in your dream is built from your own memories, so the questions only you can answer matter more than any reading.

• Whose home was it: yours now, your childhood one, or one you've never seen?
• Did being there feel safe, sad or trapping?
• Who was there with you, and who was missing?
• Were you arriving, leaving, defending it or losing it?
• What in your life has moved lately, people or places or plans?

Oniri's questions start in the same place, with whose home it was and how it felt to be there, so the home in its reading is yours.