What do your dreams reveal about you? It depends where you’re from.
From the oracles of ancient Rome to Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, humans have long turned to the dream world to decode the mysteries of the mind.
Your dreamscape is the land where anything is possible. One minute you’re walking through a beautiful meadow—and the next you’re falling to your death over a cliffside. Your teeth may fall out for no apparent reason, or you may see a snake slither out the corner of your eye.
The average adult spends roughly a third of their life asleep, which means there are plenty of opportunities for our minds to experience these personalized dreamscapes. But do dreams actually mean anything? That depends on who you ask.
“Anthropologists say that if you understand what a given group believes about dreaming, you have understood their whole [culture],” says Robin Sheriff, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of New Hampshire.
Western psychologists like Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung have popularized some of the most well-known ideas about dream interpretation, but these doesn’t necessarily align with how experts in fields like anthropology and folklore understand dreams.
Here’s what you need to know about dream interpretation and how your culture may influence what a dream means to you.
What is dream interpretation?
Dream interpretation can be traced back to ancient Rome and ancient Egypt, but Sheriff says the practice likely has roots in prehistoric cultures without written records. Before dream science, also known as oneirology, was developed, dream interpretation was a cultural practice that could connect people to cultural ancestors or spirits.
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“Dreams held deep significance in traditional Chinese culture…particularly within a supernatural worldview where ghosts, spirits, and ancestral souls were believed to actively participate in human affairs,” said Ze Hong, an assistant professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Macau who has researched Chinese dream interpretation from an evolutionary perspective.
Dreams were often regarded as meaningful channels of communication from the spiritual realm, capable of revealing hidden truths or predicting future events, Hong says.
In ancient Rome, records show that dreams were seen as divine communications from the gods, and dream oracles played an important role in interpretation. Hong says this kind of practice also existed during China’s Zhou Dynasty, which lasted between 1046 B.C. to 256 B.C. Hong explains that oneiromancy, the practice of divinatory dream interpretation, became widely used to provide insight into personal relationships, illness, and even political decisions. However, this practice has declined in popularity over Chinese history, said Hong, particularly by the end of the Imperial era in the early 1900s.
The connection between dreams and the spiritual realm is something that anthropologist Roger Lohmann also found while studying the dreaming culture in Papua New Guinea.
Though Westerners might view dreams as purely metaphorical, Lohmann, an associate professor of anthropology at Trent University in Ontario, Canada, says dreams in Papua New Guinea can be interpreted as a parallel journey that your soul went on while you slept. This meant that dreams could be interpreted as being prophetic or revealing hidden information, Lohmann said. He recalls sleeping in a village near the border of Indonesia and waking up from a nightmare about his research notes catching fire.
(This is the story of the world's oldest nightmare.)
“I interpreted that [dream] as an expression of my anxiety about that something going wrong with my computer,” he said. “[But] I told the story to a man who was visiting me that morning and he said ‘Oh, you better watch out. Be very careful with the fireplace,’ because he interpreted that dream to mean something that's likely to happen in the future.”
Carl Jung’s influence on dream interpretation
The guidelines for interpreting dreams in Western cultures today typically come from psychologists Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.
The father of psychoanalytic theory, Freud wrote in 1900 that dreams represent the dormant wishes of our subconscious and could be a way to carry out repressed instinctual, or even hypersexual, desires. Over the next six decades, psychologist Carl Jung proposed his own interpretation of dream theory that says dreams might be a conversation between our conscious and subconscious selves. Jung, who had a complex friendship with Freud, believed that instead of revealing repressed desires, our dreams are meant to process our waking problems and find potential solutions.
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Jung’s dream theory also includes the idea of a collective subconscious, which suggests dreams can be interpreted in a symbolic way through distinct archetypes, such as the hero, the mother, and the trickster. According to Jung, these archetypes could be found across cultures and had universal meanings. However, this theory is quite different from what anthropologists have found when studying the importance of dreams and their meaning across cultural contexts.
Interpreting dream symbols across cultures
Depending on what culture you are dreaming in, common themes or symbols can have drastically different meanings. Take a snake, for example.
In Western cultures familiar with Freud, dreaming of a snake may be interpreted as something potentially sexual, Lohmann suggested, or Jung himself wrote of snakes as representing power or danger, declaring that a “state of instinctual hell is represented as a snake with three heads.”
Hindu interpretations, however, suggest that dreaming of snake could foretell wealth and fertility—if you’re eating it in the dream, at least. Hopi and Pueblo tribes in the American Southwest also link fertility to snake dreams, although particularly in relation to agricultural cycles and the fertility of land. On the other hand, Pentecostal Christian communities in Zambia may interpret that snake in your dreams as proof of the devil.
There isn’t a set interpretation of snakes in the traditional Chinese practice, said Hong—Chinese dream interpretations were more likely to be concerned with more culturally significant symbols such as dragons or suns, signs of divine favor. But some historical documents suggest that a pregnant women dreaming of snakes once would have predicted the birth of a son—or, contradictorily, also a daughter.
Do dreams mean anything?
A person will have countless dreams in their lifetime, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that all dreams are equally important.
By the end of the Imperial period, which was right around when Freud and Jung were forming their dream theory, Hong said that it became popular to view the origins of dreams as supernatural and related to a person’s psychological state.
“For instance, dreams caused by ‘overthinking during the day’ were often dismissed as uninterpretable and meaningless,” he said.
(You can learn to control your dreams with lucid dreaming. Here’s how.)
In the Western tradition, how much or how little a dream means is up to the person having or interpreting the dream.
“Dreams, like poetry and art, offer ways to think about human experience,” Sherrif said. “There may be better or worse interpretations or analyses but we have no objective means of ascertaining their accuracy.”
