Dreaming about
shooting

A dream with a gun in it tends to wake you up fast, especially when you were the one holding it. Dreaming about shooting someone isn't a hidden wish to hurt them. It usually points to anger you haven't said out loud, a goal you're taking aim at, or something you saw in the news before bed that your mind is still working through.

What decides between those is who held the gun and what you felt when it went off. Shooting a stranger in a panic is a different dream from aiming carefully at a target, and being shot is different again. Your week matters too, because a row with your brother and a news alert about a shooting can produce the same picture for very different reasons.

What dreaming about shooting means

A gun lets you end a fight from across the room, in a fraction of a second, without ever getting close. English is full of phrases built on that (shooting down an idea, shooting from the hip, taking a shot at something), and most readings of a shooting dream come from the same place.

Anger kept at a distance

If you shot someone you know, look at what you feel about them and haven't told them. A gun keeps the other person far away, so the dream often belongs to conflicts you avoid face to face, with the colleague who takes the credit or the parent you never argue with. Relief when you fired is the clearest sign that the anger is real, and it still says nothing about what you'd actually do.

A target you're aiming at

Shooting at a bullseye or a row of cans on a fence is a calmer dream about aim and nerve. It tends to come before a job interview, an exam or any moment where you feel you get one shot, and whether you hit tells you how confident you feel about it.

Dreaming about shooting someone

This is the variation people search for most, usually with some guilt attached. Who it was matters more than the act, since a stranger tends to stand for a situation or a feeling you want gone, while someone you know points to the relationship itself. If you were shooting to protect somebody, the dream may be about responsibility more than anger. And if you kept firing and the person didn't fall, force isn't going to fix whatever you're up against. Dreams of killing someone work in a similar way.

Dreaming about being shot

Being shot is the other side of the same dream, and it's usually about feeling attacked by criticism you didn't see coming, or a remark that hit harder than it should have. Where you were hit can carry a pun, like being shot in the back by someone you trusted or shooting yourself in the foot. One theory of dreaming holds that dreams of being hurt are the brain practicing for danger so you'd react faster awake,^[1] which treats the dream as practice and never as a warning.

Dreaming about a mass shooting

A dream about a mass shooting is frightening, and it nearly always follows the news. Dreams pick up what you've spent the day worrying about,^[2] and few stories stay with people like a school shooting. If you were hiding, the dream is about helplessness, and if you were getting others out, it's about how responsible you feel for the people around you. It doesn't predict anything. But if these dreams keep returning after a shooting you lived through or were close to, talk to a doctor, and these ways to have fewer nightmares can help in the meantime.

Dreaming about a gun that won't fire

You pull the trigger and nothing happens, or the bullets roll out of the barrel onto the floor. It's the dream version of shouting with no voice, and it comes when something in your life isn't responding to effort. The tools you'd normally reach for (an argument, your authority, money) aren't working. The weapon itself has its own page, on guns.

Dreaming about shooting stars

A shooting star is a meteor burning up in the sky, nothing to do with guns, but people search for both. Most of us were told to make a wish on one, and the dream tends to be about exactly that, something you want and half believe you can't get just by trying. It can also be about something bright and brief that you saw and lost, a person or a chance. Did you get to make your wish before it went out? More on stars in dreams.

Dreaming about shooting according to Jung and Freud

Freud's list has weapons in it, and Jung's ideas explain a good deal of the anger.

Jung on the stranger you shoot

In Jung's terms a dream leans against how you carry yourself by day, so someone who never raises their voice is a natural candidate for a gun dream.^[4] The shadow, the part of you you'd rather not own, often appears as a stranger or an intruder of your own sex, so the figure you shoot may be a trait you've disowned, which doesn't go away by being aimed at.

Freud on the long weapon

In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud listed long weapons, knives and daggers among them, as male sexual symbols.^[3] A gun fits that list, so a Freudian reading would look for desire, or a fear of it, especially when the gun misfires. That's his list applied, not something he wrote about guns, and he'd have started with your own associations.

Other readings

Antti Revonsuo, a Finnish cognitive neuroscientist, and a colleague read 592 dream reports from Finnish students: being shot at or stabbed, rare or absent in their waking lives, was not very uncommon in their dreams.^[5] Deirdre Barrett, a Harvard psychologist who studies dreams and trauma, noticed mass shooters in the streets among the disasters that stood in for the virus in pandemic dreams, as she had after 9/11.^[6]

Questions to ask about your shooting dream

Two people can dream the same shooting and need two different readings, so start with these.

• Who held the gun, and who was it pointed at?
• Did you feel anger, fear, relief or nothing at all?
• Did the shot hit, miss or fail to fire?
• Had you seen a shooting in the news, a film or a game that day?
• Who in your life would you rather keep at a distance right now?

Before Oniri reads a shooting dream it asks you this kind of thing, so the gun is read against your own week.