Dreaming about
sleeping

Sleep is the one thing we all do every night without remembering any of it, so it's odd to find yourself doing it inside a dream. Dreaming about sleeping usually points to a need for rest, sometimes of the body and often of the mind. It can also point to something you've stopped paying attention to, a part of your life that's been left to doze while you deal with everything else.

People also mean something quite different when they search for this, which is sleeping with someone, and that's a separate dream with its own readings. In both cases the details decide it. Where you were sleeping, who was beside you, and whether you could wake up when you wanted to all change the meaning, and so does how tired you've actually been.

What dreaming about sleeping means

Most readings of a sleeping dream come back to rest or to attention, whether you're getting enough of one, or giving too little of the other. These are the ones that come up most.

A need for rest

The plainest reading of a sleeping dream is exhaustion. If you've been sleeping badly, working late or caring for someone, the dream may simply be your body asking for what it isn't getting. A deep, peaceful sleep in the dream often comes as a wish, and one where you kept being woken up tends to match a life full of interruptions. If that sounds familiar, the post on better sleep habits is a good place to start.

Something you've stopped noticing

But sleep is also a picture of not paying attention. Sleeping through an alarm, through a storm, or while something important happens around you can point to a part of your life you've been ignoring. That might be a health check you keep postponing, a relationship running on autopilot, or a problem you've decided to "sleep on" for months. The dream asks what would happen if you woke up to it.

Wanting to withdraw

Sometimes sleep in a dream is a way out. Climbing into bed in the middle of the day, or falling asleep somewhere you shouldn't, can be about wanting to escape from a situation that's too much, or about low mood. If the dream felt heavy and you couldn't get up, and the feeling has been with you by day for weeks, it's worth talking to someone about it.

Dreaming about sleeping with someone other than your partner

This is one of the most searched versions, and it leaves many people feeling guilty for no good reason. In one survey of typical dreams, 76.5% of students said they'd had a sexual dream,^[1] so you're in large company. Sleeping with someone else in a dream isn't cheating and doesn't predict it. What it tends to show is a hunger (to feel desired, to have some excitement back, to be noticed) or a pull toward something the other person has. If it's your partner who strays in the dream, the cheating dream post covers that version.

Dreaming about sleeping with your ex

Sleeping with an ex can stir up a lot on waking, but it rarely means you want them back. A shared bed is about familiarity, the habits of a life you once had together, and the dream may be missing the routine more than the romance. Has anything reminded you of that time lately, an anniversary, an old photo, a new partner doing something the same way? If the dream felt comforting, ask what you miss, but if it felt wrong, the dream may be closing a door you'd left ajar.

Dreaming about sleeping with a man or a woman

Sex dreams about someone you know, someone famous or a total stranger are usually about desire in a broad sense. Or they're about a quality in that person (confidence, gentleness, power) that you want more of. Having a same-sex dream tells you nothing settled about who you're attracted to. And the spiritual readings people search for land close to the psychological ones, treating the dream as a union with a part of yourself as much as with another person. The page on dreaming about sex goes into these further.

Dreaming about someone sleeping beside you

Waking in the dream to find someone asleep next to you is about closeness and trust. If it was your partner, it may simply be the comfort of the relationship, but if it was a stranger, the dream can point to a wish for companionship, or to a new side of yourself you're getting used to. And if the person beside you felt threatening, look at where in your life you feel someone is too close for comfort.

Dreaming about sleeping in a strange place

Falling asleep in a station, a classroom, a stranger's house or out in the open is usually about feeling unsafe or out of place while you're at your most vulnerable. It tends to come when you're between homes, jobs or relationships, without a place that feels like yours. If you slept peacefully anyway, the dream may be a sign you're more at ease with the in-between than you think.

Dreaming about trying to sleep and not being able to

Lying in a dream bed unable to fall asleep is a strange loop, and it's often a plain reflection of insomnia, stress or a busy mind. It can also be about not being able to let something go. If it's a frequent dream, your real sleep may need attention more than your dream does. And if you're curious about what's going on at night, the post on REM sleep and dreams explains the stages.

Dreaming about sleeping according to Jung and Freud

Neither man left a note on dreams of sleeping, but the person asleep beside you is a figure each of them had ideas about.

Jung: the stranger in the bed

In Jung's scheme the shadow is whatever you've refused to own, and it often turns up as a stranger or intruder of your own sex, while a figure of the other sex can be the anima in a man or the animus in a woman.^[2] Read that way (our application), the stranger asleep beside you is a part of yourself you're only now getting used to. Someone you'd never want next to you in waking life points toward the shadow, someone you felt drawn to toward the anima or animus.

Freud: the borrowed face

Freud wouldn't take "sleeping with" at face value. For him a dream disguises a wish and borrows its images from the day before, so the person beside you is often a leftover, a face lent to a wish that has little to do with them.^[3] Since your own associations come before any symbol, "what did you do with them yesterday?" is a better first question about a colleague in your bed than "do I want them?".

Other readings

Artemidorus, a 2nd-century diviner whose dream book is the fullest to survive from antiquity, took a dream of sleeping as a sign of idleness, bad for everyone except the frightened, since sleep frees them from fear.^[4] Neville Goddard, a teacher born in 1905 whose whole message was that imagination creates reality, used the minutes before sleep for his practice of revision: you replay a scene as you wish it had gone, over and over, until it feels real, which he offered as his answer to a bad dream.^[5]

The biblical and spiritual meaning of sleeping in dreams

Sleep is where several famous scenes in the Bible happen, and two other texts name sleep itself.

Sleep in the Bible

Jacob's most famous dream comes on a night when he's alone, on the run from his brother Esau, with nothing but a stone under his head.^[6] It's a hard bed, and the place where his vision of the ladder comes. In Mark, Jesus sleeps on a cushion in the back of a boat through a storm, and the frightened disciples wake him.^[7]

Sleep in the Quran and the Atharvaveda

Both texts treat sleep as a small death. The Quran, Islam's scripture, says God takes souls at death and, in a similar way, during sleep, keeping those whose death is decreed and sending the others back.^[8] The Atharvaveda, which holds some of the oldest prayers against bad dreams, calls sleep "not alive, not dead" in a hymn that asks it to keep evil dreams away.^[9]

Questions to ask about your sleeping dream

A dream about sleeping is easy to dismiss as boring. But a few questions usually bring out what it was about, and the answers can be surprising.

• Where were you sleeping, and did it feel safe?
• Who, if anyone, was beside you?
• Could you wake up when you wanted to?
• How much sleep are you really getting at the moment?
• What in your life have you stopped paying attention to?

Oniri asks about these kinds of details before reading a dream, and a sleeping dream often turns out to be about your days more than your nights.