What Does It Mean When You Dream About Vomiting?
Artie Wu — Fifteen years guiding inner work, 100,000+ people
The Short Answer
A dream about vomiting is not a sign that something is wrong with your body, and it is not a warning of sickness to come. In the language of dreams, vomiting is almost the opposite of what it feels like in waking life. It's the picture of something lost being given back to you — a part of yourself that got swallowed down and buried, now coming up and out into the open where you can finally catch it. The dream isn't predicting illness. It's showing you a homecoming that happens to look messy on the way in.
What Vomiting Actually Means in Your Dream
Let me tell you the private feeling this dream sits on, because almost everyone who has it feels it and never says it: the fear of losing control. The sense that if you actually let go — really let the thing come up — you'd lose your grip, lose your dignity, maybe even lose someone's love. That clenched, holding-it-down feeling is exactly what the dream is made of. And I want to defuse it right at the start: the dream is not asking you to be afraid of that. It's showing you that the letting-go is a return, not a loss.
Here's how I read vomiting. The quintessential picture of it is Jonah and the whale. The whale swallows Jonah down — takes him into the dark, into the tomb, for three days — and then, at the end, the whale comes up to the shore and vomits Jonah back out onto dry land, alive. That's the whole shape of it. Vomiting, in a dream, is the lost part of you being brought back up and returned. Something that was down in the dark for a long time is coming home.
So when you dream of vomiting, don't picture disease. Picture a part of yourself that got sent away — a piece of your own aliveness, your anger, your voice, your body's honest knowing — that had been kept down out of sight, and is now surfacing. It comes up the only way buried things can come up: all at once, without your polite permission. That's why it feels distasteful. But the distaste is on the surface. Underneath, something good is happening. A member of your own inner family is coming back home.
And notice how often, in these dreams, someone is trying to catch it — cupping their hands under it, cleaning it up, tending to it. That instinct is the truest part of the dream. Some deep part of you already understands this isn't garbage to flush away. It's precious. It's you, coming back to yourself.
Context Changes Everything
Someone else vomiting — a mother, a sister, an elder. When another figure does the vomiting and you're nearby, that figure is a part of you, and their letting-go is really yours. If you find yourself cupping your hands to catch it, the dream is telling you that you're ready to receive what's returning — to hold the lost part gently instead of turning away from the mess of it.
Vomiting blood. This one shocks people, and I understand why. First, the plain thing: if you have a waking-body worry — real blood, real symptoms — that belongs with a doctor, and nothing here replaces that. But in the dream, blood isn't a wound to be feared — it's the sign that what's coming up is life force, the most alive and essential part of what got swallowed. Blood is how much this matters. It's not a disease, as one dreamer's own inner voice told her plainly; it's the natural consequence of something long held down finally moving.
Vomiting on your life path — on a bus, in a car, on the road. A vehicle is your life moving forward. Vomiting there means the return is happening while you're on your way, not in some quarantined corner. The part coming back is meant to travel with you. There's room on the bus for it.
Being afraid to vomit — the fear of losing control itself. Sometimes the dream is the holding-on, the clench, the refusal. That fear is valid and it deserves respect. But notice: you don't force it. The move is gentler than that, and I'll come to it.
Smelling the vomit — being able to smell it at all. If the striking thing in the dream is that you could smell it, even though the smell was unpleasant, that's the good news hiding inside the bad. Being able to smell it means you're present to what's returning. You're actually there for it, senses open, instead of numb.
The dream that keeps coming back. A recurring vomiting dream is a message being resent because the earlier ones were never opened. The repetition isn't punishment — it's insistence. Some lost part of you has been knocking for a long time, and the dream will keep bringing it up to the surface until you turn around and let it in.
What to Do With This Dream
Here's the move most people miss. The vomiting in your dream — and the part of you it's returning — isn't just a gross event to get past. It's a figure you can actually talk to. Instead of reading it like a line in a symbol dictionary, you turn toward it and interview it.
Sit somewhere quiet and let the buried part have its day. Don't force anything up and don't press anything down. Think of it the way you'd coax something shy out of a corner — you leave the door open and you wait, you don't drag it. Just let it vent, let it come, and ask it plainly: What are you? Where have you been all this time? What got you swallowed down in the first place? Then: What are you trying to bring back up to me? What do you want me to finally hold in my hands instead of turning away from? And gently, to the fear underneath: What are you afraid I'll lose if I let you come all the way out?
You'll often find the thing coming up is not disgusting at all. It's a part of your own aliveness that got sent into the dark years ago, and it has been trying, patiently, to come home. Your only job is to cup your hands.
So the one question to sit with: What part of yourself have you been holding down out of fear of losing control — and what would it mean to finally catch it, instead of flushing it away?
"It feels like talking to a real person, and it's so fun." — K.S.
What else happened in this dream about vomiting?
About the Author
Artie Wu is the founder of Preside Meditation and Ariadne. With degrees from Harvard and Stanford, he has spent fifteen years guiding over 100,000 people through inner work — dream interpretation, shadow work, parts work, and somatic healing.
He has been featured in the Gaia.com feature film Transcendence 2, and on Fox, CBS, and CNN.