Dreaming about
monsters

The word "monster" comes from the Latin monstrum, which first meant something shown to people as a sign or a warning. Most of us meet our first one long before we can spell it (under the bed, usually, or in the wardrobe). In adult dreams monsters still do the same job. Dreaming about monsters usually points to a fear you haven't put a name to, a side of yourself you keep out of sight, or someone in your life who has been behaving cruelly.

The monster's shape and what it did narrow it down. A faceless thing in the dark, a creature you recognize from a film and a monster that turns out to be you are different dreams, and so are being hunted, fighting back and making friends. Then there's what woke you, the terror itself, or the moment you finally turned around.

What dreaming about monsters means

Monsters are made of parts that don't belong together, too many eyes, the wrong number of limbs, a human face on an animal body. They're fear without a clear outline, which is exactly what the mind needs when it can't say what's wrong.

A fear you haven't named

When you're anxious and can't say why, the dream often gives the feeling a body. A shapeless monster, one you never see properly or one that keeps changing form, is usually a worry you haven't traced back to its source. Ask what has been weighing on you without a clear cause. Money, a health test, a relationship that feels off? Naming it in daylight often shrinks the monster at night.

A side of yourself you've disowned

In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the creature becomes a monster after its maker looks at it in horror and runs away. A monster dream can be about something you made and then disowned, like your anger, your jealousy (Shakespeare's "green-eyed monster"), a need you're ashamed of, or a mistake you won't talk about. The more you've pushed it away, the uglier it tends to look.

Someone behaving monstrously

Sometimes the monster is a person. People who live with a bully, a violent partner or a cruel boss often dream of them as monsters before they've admitted, even to themselves, how frightening that person is. If the monster in your dream had a familiar voice or turned up in a familiar place, take that seriously. And if someone in your waking life is hurting you, that matters more than any reading of the dream.

Dreaming about monsters trying to kill you

A monster that wants you dead is the most frightening version. It usually lines up with something you feel as a real threat, to your job, your marriage, your health or your sense of who you are. It doesn't predict anything about your safety, but it does show how big the threat feels. A well-known theory treats dreams like this as practice runs, the sleeping brain drilling its escape routes.^[2] If you survived the attack, notice how you did it, because that's often a strategy worth trying when you're awake.

Dreaming about a monster chasing you

Chases top the big surveys of typical dreams, and roughly 80% of people say they've had one.^[3] A monster behind you is something you're running from, often a feeling or a decision rather than a person. People who manage to stop, turn and look at the monster in the dream often find it changes, gets smaller, or just stands there, much like being chased by anything else. What would happen if you stopped running?

Dreaming about a monster under your bed or in your house

The monster under the bed is the first fear many of us learn. An adult who dreams it is often back in a childhood feeling (small, alone in the dark, waiting for someone to come). A monster in your home (in the cellar, the attic, behind a door you never open) is often something in your family or your private life that nobody talks about. Which room was it in? That's usually where the problem lives.

Dreaming about fighting or killing a monster

Fighting back is a turning point in these dreams, and it's a good sign about you. It means you're starting to face what the monster stands for, a fear, a habit or a person. If you won, you may feel ready to deal with it for real. But if the monster kept getting up, the problem is a stubborn one, and you might need help with it rather than more strength.

Dreaming about turning into a monster

Looking in a mirror and seeing a monster, or feeling your body change into one, is usually about shame or about anger you're afraid of. It often comes after you lost your temper, said something cruel, or did something you can't square with who you think you are. But the dream isn't telling you you're a monster. It's showing you how badly you feel about that moment, which is the first step to making it right.

Dreaming about a friendly monster

A monster that turns out to be kind, or one you make friends with, is a fear you've come to terms with, or a part of yourself you've stopped hating. These dreams often follow therapy, a hard conversation or a long-avoided decision. Children's stories are full of friendly monsters for a reason, and the dream is your own version of that story.

Dreaming about monsters according to Jung and Freud

Jung's shadow is the obvious fit for a monster, and Freud's method gives you a way to take one apart.

Jung: the monster as shadow

Jung's name for everything we refuse to see in ourselves was the shadow, and in dreams he found it tended to arrive as a pursuer, an intruder or a frightening stranger.^[1] A monster, read his way, is the shadow at its most extreme (like a demon or a zombie, only less defined), everything you refuse to be, given claws. And his advice was to get to know it rather than kill it, because what's in the shadow isn't all bad. There's often energy there you've lost touch with.

Freud: taking the monster apart

Freud's rule was to start from the dreamer's own associations and from the day before,^[5] so the questions are what the extra arm, the voice or the staircase reminds you of, and what film, story or news you took in yesterday. By his idea of disguise the monster is the picture you remember, and what it stands in front of is the real question.

Other readings

Neville Goddard, the mid-century teacher whose creed was that imagination creates reality, held that what you imagine with feeling shapes your life, and his answer to a bad dream was revision.^[4] In bed, just before sleep, you run the dream again in your mind but change it, so the monster shrinks, leaves, or sits down to talk, and keep going until the new version feels real. Sleep clinics use a very similar method for repeated nightmares, rewriting the dream while awake and rehearsing the new ending every day.

The spiritual meaning of monsters in dreams

An old Indian text puts the monster's origin inside the sleeper.

Frightful forms in the Upanishads

The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, one of India's oldest writings on the self, says that in a dream the self puts forth countless forms and may seem to see frightful things, and it counts being killed, overpowered or chased among the terrors the mind conjures from what it met while awake.^[6]

Questions to ask about your monster dream

Monsters look like they come from nowhere, but each one is built from something in your life, so these questions are worth a few minutes.

• What did the monster look like, and did it remind you of anyone?
• Was it chasing you, hiding, attacking, or just there?
• Where was it, and whose space was that?
• What have you been anxious about without knowing why?
• Is there something about yourself you've been ashamed of lately?

Oniri asks you about the monster before it says anything about it, since the creature in your cellar and the one in your mirror point in different directions. When monster nightmares break your sleep night after night, a few habits that cut down nightmares help, and so does a word with your doctor if it goes on for weeks.