In the interpretation of dreams, Cave is among the recurring images that traditional dream-books and modern depth psychology have alike tried to read. It is commonly interpreted as the hidden depths of the psyche, retreat, or buried truth.
Common readings
The cave is read as a descent into the hidden or the buried, a place of retreat, of the unconscious, or of a truth that has been kept out of sight.
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.
Caves recur as initiation and revelation sites across unrelated religious traditions independently of any dream context, from the cave settings of early Christian and Buddhist monastic asceticism to Plato's own cave allegory in the Republic, used there as a philosophical image of ignorance and enlightenment rather than as a dream report. Jungian interpretation reads a dreamed cave, when it appears, as an image of the unconscious itself or of the womb, a specifically Jungian gloss built on the cave's enclosed, interior character. As with other dream-symbol entries here, these are named, attributed interpretive positions from religious history and from a particular twentieth-century psychological theory, not a demonstrated universal meaning for cave imagery in dreams generally.