In the interpretation of dreams, Fire is among the recurring images that traditional dream-books and modern depth psychology have alike tried to read. It is commonly interpreted as passion, anger, purification, destruction, or transformation.
Common readings
Fire is among the most double-edged of dream images, read now as destructive rage or danger, now as warmth, passion or a purifying change.
Cross-Cultural and Historical Readings
Named interpretive traditions read fire quite differently from one another. The dream manual attributed to the medieval scholar Ibn Sirin, one of the most cited names in Islamic oneiromancy though much of the text circulating under his name is now judged later compilation, reads fire chiefly through harm and punishment, a contained fire read more favourably as guidance, a controlled-versus-consuming split close in structure to Artemidorus's own method despite the two developing independently. The Chinese dream-key text traditionally, if almost certainly wrongly, attributed to the Duke of Zhou likewise reads fire ambivalently, prosperity when it burns steadily at home, misfortune when it rages out of control, a pattern separate traditions converge on without contact.
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.