Dream Dictionary — What Your Dreams Are Actually Telling You

You came here to look something up. A snake. Your teeth. The house you keep walking through. That's a good instinct — the image stayed with you for a reason, and it's worth taking seriously.

But here's what a dictionary can't tell you, and it's the thing that actually matters: the snake in your dream was doing something specific. It was coiled and watching, or it came toward you and you didn't run, or you killed it and felt sick afterward. Those are three different dreams. The symbol is the vocabulary. What it was doing — and what you did back — is the sentence.

A dream isn't a message from outside you

It's a message from the part of you that never stops working. It speaks in images because images hold what explanations flatten — the whole feeling of a thing, at once, before your thinking mind has tidied it into something reasonable.

Which means the figures in your dream aren't strangers. The one chasing you, the one who died, the animal at the edge of the room — they're all made of you. Not one of them is there to punish you or predict anything. They tend to show up when something in you has been shut out long enough that it's had to get loud to be heard.

That's also why dreams so rarely feel like the tidy symbols in a dictionary. Your unconscious isn't quoting a reference book. It's using the specific image that would land on you.

How to read your own dream

Start with the symbol below, by all means — it will tell you the territory. Then do the thing the dictionary can't: go back into the dream and notice what your own part in it was. Were you watching or running? Did you reach for it? What did your body do before you had a chance to decide?

Then treat whatever showed up as someone rather than something, and ask it directly: What are you doing here? What have you been carrying? What do you want from me? Then stop and let it answer in its own words. It may not answer straight away — a part that's been shut out for years doesn't necessarily trust the first hello.

And where your own sense of the dream disagrees with anything you read here, trust yours. You're the one who was there.

Common dream symbols

Teeth

Snakes

Exes and past relationships

Death, dying and funerals

Babies, pregnancy and birth

Animals and creatures

Your body

Houses, rooms and buildings

Water, weather and the earth

Travel and vehicles

School, tests and performance

People and figures

Flying, falling and being chased

Colours

Objects and things

Have your dream read — free