In the interpretation of dreams, Door is among the recurring images that traditional dream-books and modern depth psychology have alike tried to read. It is commonly interpreted as opportunity, transition, choice, or access to the unknown.
Common readings
A door is generally read as a threshold: an opening onto a new phase, a choice to be made, or access to what has been shut away.
Cross-Cultural and Historical Readings
Freud's reading of doors and openings as figures for the body, set out in the symbolism chapter of The Interpretation of Dreams, is presented as close to self-evident within his own framework rather than derived from any prior tradition. Arnold van Gennep's early twentieth-century analysis of rites of passage as structured around a liminal, threshold phase gave later popular psychology a vocabulary, liminality, freely applied to dream doors even though his subject was waking ritual, not dreaming. The two-faced Roman god Janus, associated with doorways and transitions, gave Western culture its most durable mythological figure for the threshold, though no ancient source ties him specifically to dream interpretation.
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.