Dreaming about
salt

For most of history salt was worth fighting over, because it kept meat and fish from rotting through the winter, and the word salary goes back to the Latin for salt. Today it sits in a shaker on every table, but the old meanings haven't gone. Dreaming about salt usually points to what gives your life flavor and worth, to keeping something good from spoiling, or to a hurt that stings. Salt is also tied to tears and the sea, which is where its sadder readings come from.

Knocking over a salt shaker at dinner is a long way from tasting tears, and salting a meal for friends is a long way from a pillar of salt in the desert. Then look at your week, at anything you've been trying to keep from going bad and anything that still stings.

What dreaming about salt means

Salt does three things that give it its meaning in dreams. It adds flavor, it preserves, and it stings an open cut. Most salt dreams lean on one of them.

Flavor and worth

Food without salt tastes flat, and a dream about salt can be about what makes your life worth living, your relationships, work you care about, a bit of fun. When someone is "the salt of the earth", they're honest, solid and good. If the dream felt warm, it may be about a person like that in your life, or about wanting to be one.

Keeping things from spoiling

Salt preserves, so it can stand for what you're trying to protect from time, like a memory, a tradition or a relationship you don't want to lose. A dream of salting food or storing it carefully can be about holding on, for better or worse.

A hurt that stings

Salt in a cut hurts, and "rubbing salt in the wound" is making a bad thing worse. Salt is also in tears and seawater, so salty dreams can be about sadness, close to dreams about crying. If the salt in your dream hurt, ask what's been making an old pain worse.

Dreaming about spilling salt

Spilling salt is the most familiar salt dream, thanks to a superstition so old that many people still throw a pinch over their left shoulder to undo it. In Leonardo's Last Supper, the overturned salt cellar sits by Judas's elbow. In a dream, spilled salt usually points to worry about a small mistake with big consequences, or a feeling that something is about to go wrong. If others stared at you, the worry may be about being blamed.

Dreaming about eating salt

Eating salt on its own, or tasting food that's far too salty, is often about something overdone, a criticism that went too far, or a situation that's become hard to swallow. It can also be your body: if you had a salty dinner and woke up thirsty, the dream may have been that simple, your body asking for water and your mind putting it in a scene.

Dreaming about a pillar of salt

Lot's wife looked back at the burning city of Sodom against the angels' warning, and "she became a pillar of salt".^[1] A dream of turning to salt, or of seeing someone frozen into a white pillar, is about looking back, being stuck in the past and unable to move on. It tends to turn up when you've left a home, a partner or a job behind, and part of you keeps turning around to look at what you've left.

Dreaming about salt in a wound

Salt poured on a cut is pain made worse on purpose. The dream usually points to someone who has added to a hurt, maybe by bringing up an old mistake or making fun of something you're sensitive about. If you were the one pouring the salt, the dream may be about guilt over hurting someone who was already down.

Dreaming about salt water

Salt water brings in the sea, tears and sweat. Swimming in the ocean is a very different dream from tasting salt on your lips after crying, but both share salt's link with strong feeling. A dream of salt water stinging your eyes can be about a truth that's painful to look at.

Salt in sayings

A salt dream may be acting out a phrase. Someone "worth their salt" is good at their job, a story you "take with a pinch of salt" is one you don't quite believe, and going "back to the salt mines" means returning to hard, dull work.

Dreaming about salt according to Jung and Freud

Both sections borrow ideas, since salt sits on neither man's list of symbols.

Jung: the water you can hold

To Jung, water was the commonest symbol of the unconscious, and the sea and still waters are on his list of mother symbols.^[2] Salt is what the sea and tears leave behind, so a salt dream may be something from those depths turned solid enough to hold. That step is ours, not his. Ask which water it came from, the sea or your own tears.

Freud: the salty supper and the wish

Freud's first move would be the day before, because in his account a dream draws part of its material from yesterday, such as what you ate or which remark stung.^[3] Then he'd ask what wish the dream was disguising. After a spilled shaker and a table of stares, it may be the wish to have said or done something else at that dinner. Salt isn't among his listed symbols, so his method carries this reading and his list doesn't.

The biblical and spiritual meaning of salt in dreams

The Bible gives salt three jobs, none of them in a dream.

Salt in the Bible

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus tells his listeners "ye are the salt of the earth",^[4] which is where the phrase for an honest, solid person comes from. The book of Numbers calls the offerings set aside for the priests a "covenant of salt", a promise meant to last for ever,^[5] and in Genesis Lot's wife, who looks back at the burning city, becomes the pillar of salt described above.

Questions to ask about your salt dream

Salt can mean worth or pain, so these questions help you find which one your dream was about.

• Did you spill, eat, add or pour the salt?
• Did it add flavor, preserve, sting or freeze you?
• Who was with you, and how did they react?
• What in your life are you holding on to, or looking back at?

Oniri works through details like these with you before reading a salt dream, because a pinch over the shoulder and a pillar of salt don't share a meaning.