Dreaming about
windows

A window does two jobs at once, letting you look out and letting other people look in, and dreaming about windows usually turns on one of them. Either the dream is about how you see your life right now (clearly, through dirt, or hardly at all) or it's about how exposed you feel, and who you'd rather kept their eyes off you.

The state of the glass and the side you were on are the first clues. A clean window onto a sunny garden is a different dream from a cracked one with someone's face pressed against it. And what you were waiting for or worried about that week usually tells you what the view stood for.

What dreaming about windows means

The English word comes from the Old Norse vindauga, the "wind eye", a hole in the wall that let smoke out and light in long before anyone put glass in it. Most readings still follow those two directions, outward and inward.

How you see what's ahead

Looking out of a window is looking at something you aren't part of yet. What you saw matters, whether it was open fields, a busy street, a storm rolling in or an empty parking lot. If the glass was fogged or dirty, ask what you've been trying to see clearly and can't, like a decision with too many unknowns or a person you can't read. A window that's about to close often shows up when a chance has a date on it, hence the "window of opportunity".

Feeling watched

A lit window at night, with you inside and everyone outside able to see, is one of the most exposed places a dream can put you. If you rushed to pull the curtains, look at where in your life you feel on display, at work, online or in a family that comments on everything.

Shut out from something you want

Glass lets you see what you can't touch. Watching a party, a family dinner or an old friend through a window while nobody hears you knock is usually about feeling left out, or about a life you can picture clearly and haven't stepped into yet.

Dreaming about broken windows

A broken window means the barrier has failed. If it broke from outside (a stone, a storm, a burglar), something has got into a part of your life you thought was protected, maybe bad news or a worry you'd kept at arm's length. If you broke it yourself, especially to get out, the dream is more hopeful, because you've had enough of looking and want through. Cracked glass that hasn't fallen yet is the in-between, a strain you can see before anything gives.

Dreaming about seeing someone through a window

This is the version people search with "spiritual" added, often after seeing the face of someone who has died or someone far away. The glass is what matters here, since the person is close enough to see and still on the other side. With someone who has died, the dream usually holds both the closeness and the distance of grief, and plenty of people find it comforting. With someone alive, it can mean you see what they're going through and can't reach them. A stranger staring in is closer to the feeling of being watched, or to the thief dream of something trying to get in.

Dreaming about climbing through a window

Windows aren't meant for walking through, so using one is a way in or out that skips the proper entrance. Climbing in can be about getting what you want by a side route (a job you got through a friend, say), and climbing out is escape, common when the front door in your life, the official way out, feels blocked.

Dreaming about a window that won't open or close

A window stuck shut is air you can't get, a situation where you can see the way out and can't use it, close to dreams of being trapped. One that won't close is the opposite. Cold and noise keep coming in and you can't keep them out, which often points to a boundary someone keeps ignoring.

Dreaming about windows according to Jung and Freud

Jung: the window in the psyche's house

Jung took the house to be a picture of the psyche, an idea that came out of his own dream of a house whose floors went down through layers of history.^[1] The step from his house to its windows is ours. If the house is the mind, a window is where the inner rooms meet the outside world, so how many there were, how high they sat and whether they were boarded up says something about how open you are right now.

Freud: the glass and the wish

We have no window reading from Freud to point to, so this is his method put to work on one. He gave the dreamer's own associations priority over any symbol, so he'd begin with which window it was, your childhood bedroom, a train, the office, and how old you felt standing at it.^[2] Then comes the wish. In his account a dream plays a wish out as if it had come true, which makes a view of a party or a street or a person behind glass a candidate for the wish to be out there, with the glass as whatever keeps you in.

The biblical and spiritual meaning of windows in dreams

Windows in the Bible

The Bible has two windows people tend to remember. Noah opened the ark's window after the flood and sent out a raven, then a dove, to see whether the land was dry,^[3] and Daniel kept praying at his open window toward Jerusalem after it had been made a crime.^[4] One is waiting to find out whether it's safe to go out, and the other is refusing to hide.

Questions to ask about your window dream

Go back to the window itself before you pick a reading, because the glass and the view carry most of it.

• Were you looking out, or was someone looking in?
• Was the glass clean, dirty, cracked or gone?
• What was on the other side, and did you want to reach it?
• Where in your life do you feel shut out, or too much on show?

Oniri asks about the view and the glass as well, before it reads anything into your dream.