What Did You Dream About?

How to use this dictionary

Dream symbols are not a fixed code, and any dictionary that tells you a snake always means one thing is overselling. What a symbol does is narrow the field — it tells you which part of your life the dream was working on. The interpretation that matters is the one that survives contact with your own week.

Three questions get more out of a dream than a lookup does. What were you doing in it, rather than what appeared? What was the feeling on waking, which is often the opposite of what the imagery suggests? And had anything in the last few days already raised that subject? Read the symbol page after those, not instead of them.

Each page below covers the traditional reading, the emotional register the symbol usually carries, and the numerological angle — the number the word itself reduces to, and what that adds. If a number also appeared in the dream, our guide to reading dream numbers explains which dream numbers are worth interpreting and which are simply scenery.

Every symbol in the dictionary