Dreaming about
your parents

Your parents are usually the first rule-makers you ever knew, and their voices stay in your head long after you've left home. Dreaming about your parents tends to reflect that: approval you still want, judgment you still fear, and the state of the relationship as it is now. Parents tend to turn up more often around big changes, such as leaving home, marrying, having children or watching them get older.

What they did in the dream matters, and so does which one of them was there. A father laying down the law, a mother who won't look at you and both of them laughing at a family dinner are three different dreams. The single parent who appears without the other tends to carry one particular side of the story, so start with that person.

What dreaming about your parents means

Parents in dreams rarely do anything at random. Their role in your life gives the dream its readings.

Your conscience

The rules your parents set become the voice that tells you what you should do. When you're facing a choice they'd have opinions about, such as a job, a partner or money, they often show up in dreams to argue it out.

Approval

Adults still want their parents' approval, even when they wouldn't admit it. A dream where your parents were proud, or disappointed, often follows something you've done that you're not sure about yourself.

Authority in disguise

A boss, a judge, a couple of royals or any pair of authorities might be your parents in another costume. For one parent on their own, see the pages on dreaming about your mother and your father.

Dreaming about your parents dying

This is the most searched parent dream, and the one people fear most. It doesn't predict anything, and Freud's reading of it (further down) wasn't a warning either. More often it comes from worry as your parents get older, or from a change between you, like a move abroad, a quarrel or a step that makes you more an adult and less their child. The dream can be its own kind of rehearsal, letting you feel something you're afraid of in a safe place.

Dreaming about your deceased parents

If a parent has died, dreaming of them is one of the most common things grief does. In one survey of more than a thousand students, 54.1% had dreamed of a dead person as alive,^[1] and when the person is a mother or father, those dreams can carry on for years. Some people wake comforted, others shaken. A parent who seems well and calm often leaves people feeling they've been given something, while an angry or distant one may point at what you never got to say, which our post on using dreams for healing looks at.

Dreaming about fighting with your parents

Arguments with parents in dreams can be old ones (curfew, school, a boyfriend they hated) or current ones dressed in old clothes. If you said things in the dream you'd never say awake, it may be letting out a frustration you've been swallowing. If you were a child again in the fight, look at where you feel treated like one now.

Dreaming about your parents splitting up

Even adults whose parents have been married for forty years dream about them divorcing. The dream is usually about the family's stability, or about something in your own life that's splitting into two camps. If your parents really did separate when you were young, something now may echo how that felt.

Dreaming about your parents according to Jung and Freud

The royal couple and the mother archetype are the two best-known parent images in dream theory.

Jung: the mother archetype and the voice of authority

Jung wrote that the mother is one of the great archetypes, a pattern that shows up in images as varied as the church, the sea, a garden or a cave.^[2] A dream mother can then be both the woman who raised you and a larger figure of care, or control, that you carry everywhere. His wise old man turns up as a doctor, a priest, a professor or whoever holds authority,^[2] and in our pairing (he didn't make it) that is where a dream father's voice often moves, into the teacher who marks your work or the doctor with the news.

Freud: royalty and the typical dream of a death

For Freud the royal couple in a dream, whatever the crown, is the dreamer's father and mother, and the child who inherits is the dreamer.^[3] He also treated a loved one's death as one of the typical dreams, and read it as an old childhood feeling, not a warning.^[3] So his question about a parent dying is how your feelings toward them have changed, never what's coming.

Other readings

Calvin Hall was an American psychologist who spent decades counting dreams, and he held that a dream shows how you see a person, not the person.^[4] A father you see as stern and autocratic gets cast in a matching role, a mother you see as nurturing performs some service, and the same father, he noted, can show up as a teacher in one dream and as a policeman, a king or an army officer in others, each a different side of the man.^[5] The parent in your dream is your picture of them, which is why it can differ so much from the person at the kitchen table.

The spiritual meaning of your parents in dreams

Joseph's parents in the Quran

In the Quran the boy Joseph tells his father he dreamed that eleven stars, the sun and the moon bowed down to him.^[6] Years later his parents and brothers bow to him, and he says "This is the interpretation of my old dream."^[7] Reading the sun and moon as his parents is what that verse implies, though the text doesn't spell out each item. It's the story of one dream and one family, and it doesn't make a dream of your own parents a sign.

Questions to ask about your parent dream

Your family's history decides the meaning more than any dictionary can. A few questions help you find it.

• Were both your parents there, or only one?
• Were you a child in the dream, or your adult self?
• Did they approve, disapprove or not notice you?
• What decision is in front of you that they'd have an opinion on?

Oniri asks about the people in the dream and what's going on in your life before reading it, which matters most with a dream about your own family.