In the interpretation of dreams, Death is among the recurring images that traditional dream-books and modern depth psychology have alike tried to read. It is commonly interpreted as endings and transformation rather than literal death, a phase closing.
Common readings
Interpreters across traditions caution against reading a death dream literally; it is far more often taken as the ending of a chapter and the clearing of ground for what comes next.
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
Who dies in the dream governs the reading. One's own death, the death of a parent or child, and the death of a stranger are handled as three different images, and the dream's emotional register, terror, calm or even relief, is weighed alongside the event. Interpreters in the psychological traditions are careful to separate dreams of dying from dreams of the already dead, who tend to appear in visitation dreams with a very different, often consoling, character. Literal prediction is the one reading the modern traditions decline.