In the interpretation of dreams, Dog is among the recurring images that traditional dream-books and modern depth psychology have alike tried to read. It is commonly interpreted as loyalty, friendship, protection, and instinctual fidelity.
Common readings
The dog is generally read as a figure of loyalty and friendship, a protector, or a faithful instinctual part of the self.
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.
As with other animal dream content, dogs are a documented category in Hall and Van de Castle's content-analysis system, which counts their recurrence across large samples of ordinary reported dreams without assigning fixed meaning. The folk reading of a dog as loyalty and friendship draws on the animal's long domesticated relationship with humans and its symbolic role across numerous unrelated cultures, from psychopomp figures guiding the dead in ancient Egyptian and Mesoamerican belief to the companionable house-dog of modern Western life, but this is a cultural association carried into the dream-symbol genre rather than a finding specific to dream research about what a dog in a dream signifies for the person who dreamed it.