Dreaming about
a ladder

A ladder is the simplest machine for getting higher, and also one of the easiest things to fall off. Dreaming about a ladder usually holds both of those facts. It's about progress, a climb you're making at work, in a relationship or in your own life, and about how safe the climb feels, whether the ladder is steady, who's holding it and how far down the ground looks.

Which way you were going, and what happened on the way, decide the reading. Climbing up into sunlight is a different dream from hanging off a broken rung, and walking under a ladder adds a superstition of its own. What you were reaching for, and how much you trusted the ladder, are what make it your dream.

What dreaming about a ladder means

We talk about the career ladder, the property ladder and the social ladder, and dreams use the image just as freely as we do.

Progress, one rung at a time

Climbing a ladder is the most common ladder dream, and it's usually about moving up, a promotion, a degree, saving for a home, getting better at something hard. Unlike stairs or an elevator, a ladder is narrow and needs both hands, so the dream also shows effort and concentration. If the climb felt steady, you probably feel on track.

The fear of falling

Ladders are where people fall from, and a ladder dream is often as much about the drop as the climb. A wobbling ladder, a rung that gives way or a sudden look down can be about the worry that comes with getting higher, the fear of being found out in a new role, or of losing what you've worked for. Falling dreams are among the most common there are, with nearly three in four people remembering one.^[1]

Ups and downs that aren't in your control

In Snakes and Ladders, a board game that began in India as a game about virtue and vice, the ladders carry you up and the snakes slide you back down by the luck of a dice roll. Some ladder dreams have that feeling, of progress handed to you or taken away by forces you don't control.

Dreaming about climbing a ladder

Climbing up is moving toward something. Where the ladder led matters, a roof, a window, a loft, the sky, as does what you hoped to find. If the ladder went on and on with no top in sight, the dream may be about a goal that keeps moving, a career where there's always one more rung.

Dreaming about falling off a ladder

Falling from a ladder is the fear of losing ground, a demotion, a breakup, a plan collapsing. Did you slip, did the ladder tip, or did someone knock it? A fall that's your own fault points to self-doubt. A fall caused by someone else points to trust, often in a person who's meant to be supporting you.

Dreaming about a broken ladder

A ladder with missing or rotten rungs is a way up that isn't sound. It can be about a path that skips steps, a promotion you're not ready for, a relationship moving too fast, a plan with a gap in the middle. A ladder that's too short, stopping below where you need to go, is the feeling of not having enough, skills, money or support, to reach what you want.

Dreaming about walking under a ladder

Walking under a ladder is supposed to be bad luck, a superstition still strong enough that many people step round one in the street. In a dream it usually reflects a worry about taking a risk or tempting fate. It doesn't predict anything. It may simply show how cautious you've been feeling.

Dreaming about a ladder according to Jung and Freud

The ladder is one of the images where the two men's lists and methods point in different directions.

Jung: the persona's climb

Jung left no ladder entry, and the persona is the nearest fit among his figures. It is the face and role you wear in public, the mask or uniform of a job.^[2] A career ladder is mostly the persona's climb, with a bigger title and a bigger mask at every rung, and the fear of being found out in a new role is what happens when the person underneath is a rung or two behind the mask. In that reading a wobble near the top, or a ladder that is too short, says less about your ability than about how far the role has outrun you.

Freud: steps, ladders and stairs

Freud listed steps, ladders and stairs, and climbing them, among the dream's symbols for sex.^[3] He was serious about it, and if your ladder dream had a charge to it, a climb toward a window or someone steadying the ladder from below, his reading is worth a thought. A ladder that was all effort and a pot of paint in your hand probably isn't about that. Either way he asked the dreamer for their own associations first.

Other readings

Artemidorus, a Greek diviner from Ephesus writing in the 2nd century, read a ladder or a staircase as travel and a change of place, with the rungs standing for advancement. He added that some interpreters said it meant danger,^[4] the same split between climb and risk that this page opened on.

The biblical and spiritual meaning of a ladder in dreams

Jacob's ladder in Genesis

The Bible's best-known ladder is itself a dream. Jacob, running from his brother Esau, stops for the night at Bethel and sees a ladder "set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven", the angels of God climbing and descending on it.^[5] He's so shaken on waking that he sets the stone he slept on upright as a pillar. If your ladder rose into the sky, the story shows how old the picture is of a climb from ordinary life toward something bigger.

Questions to ask about your ladder dream

The climb is personal, so think about yours.

• Were you going up or down, and where did the ladder lead?
• Was it steady, broken, too short?
• Who was holding it, or was anyone?
• How did you feel looking down?
• What are you climbing toward in your life right now?

A career climb and a ladder into the clouds get different readings from Oniri, which is why it asks this kind of question first.