Dreaming about
a maze

A maze is a puzzle built out of walls, a place designed so that the obvious path is usually wrong and the only way to learn it is to keep turning back. Dreaming about a maze usually means you're caught in a situation that feels endless or has no clear solution, like a job you can't find your way up in, a family problem with no right answer, or a decision with too many branches.

How the maze behaved, and how you behaved in it, tells you more. Wandering a sunny hedge maze with friends is a game, while running down stone corridors with something behind you is a nightmare. Whether you reached the center, found the exit or kept hitting dead ends are the details that decide what yours is about.

What dreaming about a maze means

Every maze has dead ends, a center and a way out, and dreams tend to fix on one of the three.

A problem with no obvious answer

The commonest reading is plain confusion. Something in your life has many possible paths and you can't tell which one leads anywhere, a career choice, a medical decision, a relationship that keeps going round in circles. The dead ends in the dream are often the solutions you've already tried.

Going round in circles

Some maze dreams are about repetition, coming back again and again to the same spot. That can reflect a habit or argument you keep returning to, a loop of worry that won't let you go, or the feeling of starting over and ending up exactly where you were.

A long way inward

A maze with a center you're trying to reach can be a different kind of dream, about getting to the heart of something, a truth about yourself, an old feeling, a decision you've been circling for a long time.

Dreaming about being lost in a maze

Being lost in a maze, no exit in sight and every turn the same, is the maze dream at its most familiar. It's close to being lost and being trapped at once. It often turns up when you've been trying hard to solve something and feel you're getting nowhere. If you sat down or gave up in the dream, notice how that felt, since you may need to stop trying for a while.

Dreaming about being chased in a maze

Being hunted through a maze is a nightmare with an old story behind it. In Greek myth, Daedalus built the labyrinth on Crete to hold the Minotaur, a monster with a bull's head that ate the young people sent in to it. One theory of dreaming suggests chases like this rehearse escape from danger,^[1] and the maze adds that you can't see what's coming round the corner. It often reflects a fear you're trying to avoid that keeps catching up, and a situation where running is only making you more lost. Theseus only found his way back out because Ariadne gave him a ball of thread, so look at who in your dream offered you a way through.

Dreaming about reaching the center of a maze

Reaching the center is a dream of arrival, often after a long struggle. What you found there is the most important detail. A treasure, a person or a quiet garden points to something you've been working toward. A monster or an empty space is more ambiguous, and may be about facing the thing at the heart of the problem, or finding the goal wasn't what you thought.

Dreaming about a maze that keeps changing

Walls that move, paths that close behind you, a map that's wrong as soon as you've learned it: the shifting maze is about a situation whose rules keep changing. A boss who keeps changing the targets, a partner whose moods are hard to read, a bureaucracy with new forms every week can all show up this way.

Dreaming about a maze according to Jung and Freud

A maze is an old image, and Jung's first move with any image was to look for its myths, where Freud's was to ask what came to mind.

Jung and the labyrinth as the Self

Jung's way with an image was to set it beside the myths that carry it,^[2] and the labyrinth has plenty: the Minotaur's maze, and the stone labyrinths set into the floors of medieval cathedrals such as Chartres, which people walked slowly as a prayer. Those cathedral labyrinths have a single path that always leads to the center, with no dead ends. Jung saw circles and centered patterns like this as images of the Self, the whole personality,^[3] so a maze dream that ends at the center can be read, his way, as a journey toward a more complete sense of yourself.

Freud on the walls that turn you back

Freud held that a dream hides its real subject on purpose, so what you see is built to steer you away from what it's about.^[4] A maze is a dream about that very steering, with every corridor sending you back before you reach the middle. Applied to yours, he'd ask what came to mind at each turn, because the thought you kept dodging on the way to the center is the one he'd follow. He didn't write about mazes; this is his method laid over the image.

Questions to ask about your maze dream

A maze is about finding your way, so start by asking where you were trying to get.

• Were you looking for the exit or the center?
• Were you alone, chased, or with someone?
• Did the walls stay still?
• What in your life feels like it has no way out right now?

Oniri goes over questions in this direction before it reads your dream, since a maze with a way out and a maze without one are very different nights. If maze nightmares keep coming back, there are ways to have fewer nightmares.