In the interpretation of dreams, Bridge is among the recurring images that traditional dream-books and modern depth psychology have alike tried to read. It is commonly interpreted as transition, connection, and the crossing from one state to another.
Common readings
A bridge is generally read as a passage between two conditions or phases, and the ease or peril of the crossing as the difficulty of the change.
The reading of dream symbols has a long documented history, from the Oneirocritica of Artemidorus in the second century to Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and the archetypal psychology of C. G. Jung. Such meanings are interpretive conventions of those traditions, offered here as ways the image has been understood rather than as fixed or established fact; in practice a symbol takes much of its sense from the individual dreamer and the setting of the dream.
What changes the reading
Interpreters attend to whether the bridge is crossed. Standing before it, turning back halfway, watching it sway or fail, and reaching the far bank are read as four different dreams, and the nature of what runs beneath, a torrent, a calm river, a gorge with no bottom, colours the risk the crossing carries. The state of the bridge matters as much: a firm span, a rope bridge and a broken one describe different degrees of trust in the passage. What waits on the far side, when the dream shows it, is usually taken as the point of the whole image.