Dreaming about
eggs

Eggs are one of the most ordinary foods in the kitchen and also the most familiar picture of a life about to begin, and dreams use both sides. Some egg dreams are just yesterday's breakfast replayed. The rest are nearly always about potential, something in your life that hasn't happened yet, like a plan, an idea or a family you're hoping for, and how fragile it feels.

What happened to the eggs matters more than anything else in the dream. Eggs hatching, eggs breaking in your hands and eggs that turn out rotten are three very different dreams, and so is finding a single egg compared with carrying a whole basket of them. Your feeling in the dream and what you're working towards right now settle which of the readings below fits.

What dreaming about eggs means

Few objects have given English as many sayings. We walk on eggshells around people, warn each other not to put all our eggs in one basket, save a nest egg for later and count chickens before they've hatched. Most egg dreams turn out to be one of those phrases, acted out.

Something new on its way

An egg is a beginning that hasn't started, and most egg dreams come when you're waiting for something to begin. It could be a business you're planning, a book you haven't written, a move you've half decided on or a relationship in its first weeks. If you were keeping the eggs warm or carrying them carefully, you're looking after something that matters to you. But if you were ignoring them, ask what you've put aside for later.

Something fragile you're protecting

Eggs break easily, and a dream about holding them or trying not to drop them often goes with a situation where one wrong move could crack it. Do you find yourself "walking on eggshells" around someone, a moody partner, a fragile parent or a boss with a temper? Eggshells underfoot are a very literal way for a dream to say so.

A family, wanted or feared

Eggs are a plain symbol of fertility, and they show up often in the dreams of people trying to have a baby, going through IVF, or wondering whether they want children at all. They also come after a pregnancy loss. None of this means the dream knows anything about your body. But it does mean the hope or the worry is on your mind, and dreams about being pregnant tend to arrive in the same weeks.

Money and security

A "nest egg" is money set aside for the future, and "all your eggs in one basket" is a warning about risk. If the eggs in your dream were stored, counted, hidden or stolen, the dream may be about savings, a single job you depend on or an investment you're nervous about.

Dreaming about broken eggs

Broken eggs are the most searched egg variation, and they usually go with a setback, or the fear of one. A plan that fell through, a pregnancy that ended, a friendship that cracked over something small, any of these can show up as eggs smashed on the floor. But there's an old saying that you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs, and some broken-egg dreams are about a loss that makes room for something else. How did you feel when they broke? Panic and guilt point to the first reading. Relief, or simply getting on with cooking, points to the second.

Dreaming about eggs hatching

Eggs hatching are about something arriving, often sooner than you expected. What came out matters a great deal. A chick or a baby bird usually goes with a hope taking shape, like a project finally going live or a relationship becoming real. Something strange hatching, a snake or a creature you didn't recognize, can point to a plan that is turning out differently from what you intended. And if the egg cracked but nothing came out, ask whether you've been waiting for something that isn't coming in the form you imagined.

Dreaming about eating or cooking eggs

Eating eggs is often just about food, especially if you had them the day before (there's a post on how diet affects your dreams if you're curious). Beyond that, eating an egg tends to go with taking something in, like new energy, a new skill, a fresh start. Cooking them can point to how you're handling a new thing. Eggs scrambled in a hurry can mean a plan you're rushing (a wedding, a move, a launch), while a perfect fried egg suggests you feel in control. Eggs that kept burning or sticking to the pan point to effort that isn't paying off.

Dreaming about finding eggs

Finding eggs, in a nest, a hen house or hidden around a garden like an Easter egg hunt, is usually a happy dream about discovery. It tends to come when you've noticed a chance you hadn't seen, or found something in yourself you didn't know was there, such as a talent, a feeling or an old ambition. If you found them somewhere strange (your car, your desk, your bed), the place says where the chance lies. A nest full of eggs is also about home, and about how ready you feel to build one.

Dreaming about rotten eggs

Rotten eggs look perfectly normal until you crack them, and the dream reading follows from that. Something that seemed fine from the outside, a deal, a plan, a person, turns out to have gone bad inside. English calls an untrustworthy person "a bad egg", and if the dream left you thinking of someone, that's worth noting. A rotten-egg dream can also be about an idea you held on to for too long, a plan kept waiting until it spoiled.

Dreaming about a golden egg

Aesop's fable of the goose that laid the golden eggs ends with the owner killing the goose to get all the gold at once, and finding nothing inside. A golden egg in a dream is often about a source of value in your life, a job, a client, a talent or a relationship that keeps giving. Are you looking after it, or getting impatient? The dream may be asking whether you're about to squeeze it too hard. Dreams about gold have their own page.

Dreaming about a basket full of eggs

Lots of eggs at once, a basket, a tray or a hen house full of them, can mean abundance, more ideas and chances than you know what to do with. It can also mean the opposite worry, everything depending on one fragile container. If you were carrying the basket and afraid of tripping, think about whether too much of your life rests on a single job, person or plan. Chickens laying eggs in a dream point more towards steady output, the daily work that slowly adds up.

Dreaming about eggs according to Jung and Freud

Eggs aren't on either man's list of dream symbols, so the sections below try out an idea of each on an egg and say so.

Jung: the child and the snake in the shell

The child archetype, in Jung's writing, is the figure of what's still to come, of potential and a new beginning.^[1] An egg is the child before it arrives, which is why his idea fits the commonest egg dream so well: something in your life that isn't born yet, and that you're keeping warm. His snake is the other half of the picture. He read the serpent as a symbol of instinct and of the unconscious, dangerous and healing at once,^[2] so in his terms the dream where something strange hatches, a snake or a creature you didn't recognize, is instinct coming out of a plan you thought was tame.

Freud: breakfast, wishes and the oven

Freud's day residue, the part of a dream picked up from the previous day, may explain an egg dream before any symbol does,^[3] since it can be yesterday's breakfast or a basket at an Easter hunt. After that comes the wish. For someone trying for a baby, a dream that puts the hope on the table in the shape of an egg is wish fulfilment in the plainest sense. His symbol list has boxes, cases and ovens as the womb and small animals as children, so eggs in an oven or in a box would lead his way of thinking toward children before it led to food. That part is our application, and your own associations would have been his first question.

The spiritual meaning of eggs in dreams

Long before dream books, eggs stood for the start of everything. In Chinese myth, the giant Pangu grew inside a cosmic egg and broke out to separate earth from sky, and Hindu texts describe a golden womb or egg from which the universe emerged. Christians later took up the egg at Easter as a picture of the empty tomb and new life.

Eggs in the Talmud

In the Talmud, an egg in a dream stands for a request still pending, and broken eggs for a request granted. It rests on a pun in Aramaic, where the words for "egg" and "request" are close, and the same goes for nuts, cucumbers and glass vessels, anything fragile that breaks.^[4] That's the opposite of the setback most readers see in a broken egg today.

Questions to ask about your egg dream

Each of the readings above fits some egg dreams and not others, and these questions help you find yours.

• Were the eggs whole, hatching, broken or rotten?
• Were you finding, carrying, cooking or eating them?
• How many were there, and where were they?
• What new plan, hope or person are you looking after right now?
• Is there someone you're walking on eggshells around?

Oniri asks about your life and your plans before reading a dream, so a broken egg during IVF won't get the reading of one the week before a product launch.