Dreaming about
food

Food dreams are some of the most ordinary dreams people have, and sometimes the explanation is no deeper than going to bed hungry. When it isn't, dreaming about food is usually about need. It can be what you're hungry for in your life, how well you're being looked after, or a desire you've been rationing for too long.

What decides the reading is what happened at the table. Eating happily with people you love is a long way from opening an empty fridge, and a feast you can't stop eating is a different dream again. Who cooked, who served, what it tasted like and whether you were allowed to eat at all all count, and so does whatever you've been living through lately.

What dreaming about food means

We eat several times a day for our whole lives, and we learn very young that being fed means being cared for. That gives food in dreams a body side and a feeling side, and most food dreams sit somewhere between the four readings below.

Plain hunger

Some food dreams are your body talking. Did you go to bed on an empty stomach, skip dinner, or start cutting calories this week? Then a dream full of food is often just that, and it says more about your day than about your inner life. Dreams track what we spend our waking hours thinking about,^[1] and when you're hungry, that's food.

Being looked after

Food is the first care any of us receive, and for many people it stays tied to a mother, a grandmother or a family kitchen. A dream where someone cooks for you, serves you or packs you a lunch is often about being looked after, or missing it. But if you were the one feeding everyone else and nobody fed you, ask whether that's how your life has felt lately.

Appetite for life

English uses hunger for everything we want. You can be hungry for success, starved of attention or have a big appetite for life, and desire itself is often described as hunger. A dream of devouring food, reaching for more, or eating something forbidden can be about wanting more than you've allowed yourself, in love, in work or in pleasure.

Things you're taking in

The last reading comes from how we talk about ideas and news. We chew things over, find a remark hard to swallow, bite off more than we can chew, or get fed up. A dream of food that wouldn't go down, or that you had to keep chewing, is often about something you've been asked to accept and can't quite digest.

Dreaming about eating food

Eating is the food dream people search for most, and how it felt matters more than what was on the plate. Eating slowly and with pleasure tends to come when you're content, or when you've finally given yourself something you wanted. Eating fast, alone and without tasting it is closer to comfort eating, filling a gap that isn't really hunger. If you couldn't stop eating, the dream may be about a habit or a craving (food, work, a person) that's getting harder to control. Eating with others is about closeness, and there's more on eating as an act in its own entry.

Dreaming about food all the time

"All I dream about is food" is a real complaint, and it usually has a real cause. If you're on a strict diet, fasting for religious reasons or recovering from illness, food is on your mind all day, and your dreams keep serving up the meals you can't have. The slogan on the T-shirt ("all day I dream about food") is a joke, but for someone counting every calorie it can be quite literally true at night. If that's you, the dream isn't hiding a deep meaning, and it may simply be a sign to look at whether you're eating enough.

Dreaming about cooking

Cooking in a dream is about making something for yourself or others, and the way the meal turned out is the clue. A dish that came together easily often goes with a project or a relationship you're building with care. Burned food, a recipe you couldn't follow, or guests arriving before anything was ready all point to the worry of not being able to give people what they expect. Cooking for someone specific usually says something about how much you want to please or look after them.

Dreaming about food shopping

Food shopping is about choosing what you'll take in and planning ahead (or failing to). A full cart and plenty of choice tend to come with a sense that you have options right now, in work or in love. Empty shelves or a basket you can't afford point to scarcity, which can mean money worries or a feeling that what you need isn't available to you. Shopping for someone else's meal is about caring for them, or about being the one who always has to remember what everyone needs.

Dreaming about a feast

A feast or a buffet is food in abundance, so it's usually a dream about plenty, celebration and belonging. If you were welcome at the table, the dream often comes when life feels generous, or when you're about to celebrate something. A feast you weren't allowed to join, or watched through a window, is about feeling left out of the good things other people seem to have. And a feast where everything had gone cold or tasteless is about a celebration or an achievement that didn't feel the way you hoped it would.

Dreaming about rotten food

Rotten or spoiled food is something that was once good and has gone bad. That might be a relationship, a job, an old habit, or a promise someone made you that turned out to be empty. If you ate it anyway, what are you putting up with that's making you feel sick? If you threw it out, the dream may be about finally letting go of something past its date.

Dreaming about hair in your food

Finding hair in your food is a dream of disgust, and it usually comes down to something small spoiling something good. It tends to turn up when a minor problem is ruining a situation you were enjoying, like one comment that soured a dinner or one detail that put you off a person. If you recognized whose hair it was, the dream may be pointing at that person. And if you kept eating, think about where you're letting things slide to keep the peace.

Dreaming about being hungry with nothing to eat

Being hungry with no food, opening empty cupboards or reaching for a plate that keeps sliding away is a dream about need that isn't being met. It often comes when you're giving more than you're getting back, emotionally or financially, or when something you depend on (a salary, a partner's attention, your own energy) is running low. It can be a frightening dream, but it's a useful one. Few dreams point so directly at what you're missing.

Dreaming about food according to Jung and Freud

Both men left ideas that fit a dream of a meal, an empty cupboard or an oven.

Jung: food and the mother archetype

Jung's essay on the mother archetype gives a list of what stands for the mother in dreams and myth, and several of the entries are places and creatures that feed people: the cow, a ploughed field, a garden, a spring, an oven.^[2] That's his list, not a reading of dinner, but it fits what the page above says about food being the first care anyone receives. Read through his idea, a dream where someone feeds you is about the mother figure, a real mother or whoever plays that part in your life, and a dream where nobody feeds you is about her absence.

Freud: the hungry dreamer's wish

Hunger is the plainest wish there is, and Freud's idea was that a dream acts a wish out. Read his way, a feast the night after a skipped dinner is the simplest dream there is: you wanted to eat, and the dream let you.^[3] He also began with the day before, so what you ate, skipped or watched someone cook comes first. His symbol list adds a second layer for kitchens, because cupboards, cases and ovens were pictures of the womb for him, a reading to hold lightly for someone who simply opened an empty cupboard, since he put your own associations ahead of the list.

The biblical and spiritual meaning of food in dreams

Old texts treat food in a dream as a matter of provision, and one of them does it in a famous story.

Food and famine in the Bible and the Quran

The most famous food dream in history is in the Bible. Pharaoh dreams of seven fat cows eaten by seven thin ones, then of seven full ears of grain swallowed by seven thin ones.^[4] And Joseph, who is called in from prison, reads them as seven good years, then seven of famine.^[5] Elsewhere, manna falls in the desert as food from heaven.^[6] In that tradition, food in a dream is about provision, and about planning ahead in the good years.

The Quran tells the same story in its chapter on Joseph (Yusuf). There the king's dream is of fat cows eaten by lean ones and of green ears of grain beside dry ones, and Joseph reads it as seven years of plenty and seven of hardship, advising the people to store the grain in the ear.^[7]

Food eaten in a dream in the Atharvaveda

The Atharvaveda, the Veda of hymns and charms for daily life, has a one-verse prayer for food eaten in a dream and not found in the morning, asking that it be propitious to the dreamer.^[8] The verse gives no reading of the meal itself, only the wish that it do the dreamer good.

Questions to ask about your food dream

Two people can dream about the same plate of pasta for very different reasons, so before you decide what yours meant, go back over a few things.

• Were you hungry when you went to bed?
• Who cooked, who served, and who got to eat?
• Did the food taste good, bad, or of nothing at all?
• Were you eating alone or with people, and how did that feel?
• What have you been hungry for lately that isn't food?

Before it reads your dream, Oniri checks details like these with you, so a meal at your grandmother's and a midnight raid on the fridge get read differently.