Dreaming about
killing someone

The first thing most people want to know after dreaming about killing someone is whether something is wrong with them. Nothing is. Dreaming about killing someone is one of the more common disturbing dreams, and it almost never has anything to do with real violence. It usually means you want something to end, like a habit, a role you're tired of playing, a conflict that has gone on too long, or a side of yourself you're ready to leave behind.

The details tell you which. Who you killed matters most, whether a stranger, your boss, your partner or someone you've never met, and so does how you felt afterwards (relieved, horrified, calm, desperate to hide it). A dream is also more likely to turn violent after a violent film or a tense day, so it's worth thinking back to what you watched and what happened before bed.

What dreaming about killing someone means

Death in our dreams is almost always about change, and killing is the version where we're the ones making the change happen. Most of these dreams fall into one of four readings.

Wanting something to end

The commonest reading is the plainest. Something in your life has gone on too long, and part of you wants it gone for good (a job that drains you, a habit you can't break, a pattern with someone that keeps repeating). Killing is the most final image the mind has for "stop", which is why these dreams often come just before you make a real decision to quit, leave or say no.

Anger with nowhere to go

When you know the person you killed, the dream is often about anger you haven't expressed. You may be furious with someone you also love, or need, or can't afford to fight, and the dream gives that anger an outlet with no consequences. It doesn't mean you want them dead. But it does mean the anger is bigger than you've admitted, and that it might be worth finding a safer way to say some of it.

Cutting off a part of yourself

When the victim was a stranger, the dream is often about you. Who did they seem like, weak or cruel, needy or arrogant? That trait may be something you're trying to get rid of in yourself, whether it's your old shyness, a people-pleasing habit or a temper you're ashamed of. Seen this way, a frightening dream can be a sign of growth.

Self-defence and survival

Killing an attacker to survive is a different dream again. It usually comes when you feel threatened by something in waking life (a hostile workplace, a controlling relationship, a crisis) and part of you has decided to fight for yourself. The violence is the dream's way of showing how serious the threat feels, and how determined you are.

Dreaming about killing someone you know

Killing someone you know, a friend, a colleague, a parent or a partner, is the version that worries people most. It almost always points to the relationship, not the person, and to something in it that you want to change or end. If you killed your boss, look at the pressure of your job. If you killed a parent, the dream may be about stepping out from under their influence, which is a normal part of growing up at any age.

Dreaming about killing a stranger

Killing someone you don't know is usually less about anyone else and more about you. The stranger often stands for a quality, a feeling or a version of you that you're trying to put behind you. And if the dream left you oddly calm, that's often a sign you've already made your peace with the change.

Dreaming about killing someone and feeling guilty

Many of us have spent the rest of such a dream hiding a body, cleaning up, or waiting to be caught. That guilt is usually the real subject. It tends to come when you've done something (or think you have) that you're afraid will come out, or when you've made a change that hurt someone, even if it was the right thing to do. A dream like this often fades once you've said sorry, or decided you don't need to.

Dreaming about killing someone in self-defence

If someone attacked you and you killed them to survive, the dream is about protecting yourself. It often comes during a period when you've had to stand up to someone, set a boundary or fight for your place. Guilt afterwards is common, but it usually reflects how uncomfortable you are with being the one who pushes back, not anything you did wrong.

Dreaming about someone being killed in front of you

Watching a killing you can't stop is a different kind of nightmare, because you're the witness and not the one acting. It often points to helplessness, a situation you see going wrong around you (a family conflict, a friend in trouble, the news) without being able to step in. If the victim was someone close to you, the dream may track worry for them, and it doesn't predict anything about their safety.

Dreaming about being killed

Being killed, by a knife or a gun or someone you can't see, is about the other side of change, something ending that you didn't choose. It often comes when you feel a part of your life is being taken from you, like a job, a relationship or your sense of who you are. Being stabbed in particular tends to go with feeling betrayed, as in a stab in the back. If the dream went on after your death, notice what came next, because people who dream past their own death often describe a strange relief.

Dreaming about killing a snake

This is by far the most searched version, and it reads very differently from killing a person. Killing a snake is usually about overcoming a fear, a temptation or someone you don't trust. If it was hard and frightening, the dream marks a struggle you're winning. But killing a snake that wasn't threatening you may mean you're cutting off something (an instinct, a desire) that didn't need to go.

Dreaming about killing spiders, cockroaches or rats

Killing small creatures you find disgusting or frightening is usually about dealing with small, nagging problems, the kind that creep back if you don't keep on top of them. Cockroaches and rats tend to point to something you feel is dirty or unwanted in your life, and spiders to anxiety or a person who feels like they're spinning a web around you. And if you kept killing them and more kept coming, the dream may be telling you to stop swatting at symptoms and look for the source.

Dreaming about killing someone according to Jung and Freud

Killing is where the big dream theories get uncomfortable, and where it's most important to be accurate about what each one actually said.

Jung: the shadow and the stranger you kill

Jung's shadow, the part of yourself you won't look at, often shows up in dreams as a stranger of your own sex.^[1] Applied to a killing dream, that suggests a useful question. Were you killing a figure that carried something you hate in yourself? Read through that idea, the dream may show you trying to get rid of a trait you'd do better to understand.

Freud: typical dreams, wishes and the knife

Freud counted dreams in which someone you love dies among the "typical dreams" that almost everyone has, and his whole theory treats dreams as disguised wishes.^[2] That's where the fear of a hidden wish comes from. But in his method the meaning is never read off the image, it comes from the dreamer's own associations first. His list of symbols adds a wrinkle for the knife from the kitchen drawer: knives, daggers and other long sharp weapons stand for the male body in it, so a dream of killing with one is, in his terms, about more than anger. He would still have asked what the knife and the victim brought to your mind before anything else.

Other readings

Calvin Hall, a psychologist who counted dreams for a living, tens of thousands of them, built a set of norms from about a thousand dreams of college students in the 1940s and early 1950s. In them, murder made up 6% of the aggressions in men's dreams and 2% in women's, and across all aggressive encounters the dreamer was more often the victim (48% of men's, 57% of women's) than the aggressor (31% and 28%).^[3]

The biblical and spiritual meaning of killing in dreams

Two old texts touch the edges of this dream, one on the anger that leads to killing and the other on being killed.

Killing in the Bible

The commandment against killing is one of the best known lines in the Bible, and many people raised with it wake from these dreams feeling guilty. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus links the old command to anger itself, warning that whoever "is angry with his brother" is also in danger.^[4] That old link between anger and killing is close to how most dream readings see it today.

Being killed in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad

The Brihadaranyaka, one of the oldest Upanishads, lists being killed with being overpowered or chased as the stock frightening dreams, and calls them terrors from waking life that the mind conjures again, out of ignorance.^[5]

Questions to ask about your killing dream

These dreams feel extreme, but the questions that open them up are ordinary ones. Go through them before settling on a reading.

• Who did you kill, and what do they mean to you right now?
• Why did you do it in the dream, and how did you feel afterwards?
• Did anyone see, and were you afraid of being caught?
• What in your life do you want to end, or have you just ended?
• What did you watch, read or argue about the evening before?

Oniri asks about these same details before it reads your dream. And if violent nightmares come back night after night, talk to your doctor, and try the techniques in how to have fewer nightmares.