Dreaming about
strangers

Most of the people in our dreams are people we know, but a good share are strangers, and they're often the ones who do the most: they chase us, kiss us, give us directions or move into our homes. Dreaming about strangers usually points either to a side of yourself you haven't got to know or to someone real that the stranger is quietly standing in for. Dream characters are also slippery, so a stranger can turn into a friend halfway through, or the other way round.

What the stranger did is the best clue. One who kidnaps you is about something taking control, one you fall for is about something you want, and a crowd of strangers in your living room is about privacy. Your feelings toward them, fear, attraction, curiosity, decide the reading.

What dreaming about strangers means

A stranger is someone with no history attached, so the dream can load them with whatever it likes. Most readings fall into three groups.

A side of you that you don't know yet

Someone with no history in your life is a good fit for something in you that has no history with you yet. The stranger is unknown because you haven't got to know that part of yourself, and Jung's names for the parts are in the section further down.

Someone the stranger stands in for

Sometimes the stranger is a person you know in disguise. If a stranger behaved exactly like your boss, your ex or your mother, the dream may be dealing with that person at a safer distance. Pay attention to their manner, their voice and the setting.

Something new arriving

Strangers are also simply the new: a new job, a new neighborhood, a change you can't picture yet. How you met them says how you feel about that change.

Dreaming about being kidnapped by a stranger

This is the most searched stranger dream, and one of the most frightening. In large collections of dreams, unknown male characters turn up as aggressors far more often than people the dreamer knows.^[1] A stranger who takes you is usually about losing control, to a situation, a demand or a feeling that has carried you off. Ask what in your life has recently taken charge of your time or your choices. If these dreams repeat, the post on having fewer nightmares has practical steps.

Dreaming about kissing a stranger

Kissing someone you've never met is usually less about romance than about taking something in. The stranger may carry a quality you want, like ease, boldness, tenderness or freedom, and the kiss is how the dream lets you have it. People who look for a spiritual meaning often read it as accepting a new path, and the psychological reading isn't far from that. If you're in a relationship, it doesn't mean you want to leave. The page on kissing goes further.

Dreaming about strangers in your house

Strangers in your house, eating at your table or sleeping in your bed, are usually new thoughts, feelings or people moving into your private life. If you felt invaded, look at where your boundaries are being crossed. If you were curious, the dream may be about room you're making for something new.

Dreaming about falling in love with a stranger

Waking up in love with someone who doesn't exist is a strange, often lovely feeling, and it can last a whole morning. The stranger usually carries what you're longing for, attention, understanding, a certain kind of person. It can point to loneliness, or to a part of yourself that you're starting to like.

Dreaming about strangers according to Jung and Freud

Jung built a cast of characters out of unfamiliar dream figures, and Freud had a use for a stranger's face too.

Jung: the stranger as a part you haven't met

Jung saw unknown figures in dreams as parts of the dreamer. A threatening stranger of your own sex, a pursuer or an intruder, is often what he called the shadow, made of the traits you've disowned and pushed out of sight.^[2] An attractive stranger of the other sex fits his anima, for men, or animus, for women, the inner figure that carries qualities you link with the other sex. His own dream of an unknown house that turned out to be his gives a way to read a stranger at your table: he read the house as standing for his mind,^[3] so a stranger moving in is a new figure in the inner household.

Freud: a face from yesterday, and a wish in disguise

Freud took a dream's raw material from the day before, so the stranger's face is often one you glimpsed yesterday without noticing, the man at the till or the woman on the platform.^[4] A dream also hides the wish behind it, and an unknown face is about the best cover there is, because it lets through a wish a familiar face couldn't. For the stranger you kissed or fell for, that gives two questions: who they stood in for, and what you were allowed to want through them.

Other readings

Calvin Hall, an American psychologist, collected more than 50,000 dream reports, and his norms come from about a thousand dreams of American college students in the 1940s and 50s. Strangers were 23% of the human characters in the men's dreams and 17% in the women's, and men dreamed of unfamiliar men more than women did, 28% of characters against 15%.^[5] A stranger in your dream is common company, so who they are tells you less than what they did.

Questions to ask about your stranger dream

Some questions to find out whose face the stranger was wearing.

• Did the stranger remind you of anyone, even slightly?
• What did they want from you?
• Were you afraid of them, drawn to them, or curious?
• Did they change into someone else during the dream?

Oniri asks you about the stranger's manner and what happened between you, because that's where a face you've never seen starts to make sense.