In the interpretation of dreams, Forest is among the recurring images that traditional dream-books and modern depth psychology have alike tried to read. It is commonly interpreted as the unknown, the unconscious, being lost, or seeking direction.
Common readings
A dark wood is a classic image of the unconscious and the unknown; being lost in it is read as confusion or a search for direction.
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.
The child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, in The Uses of Enchantment (1976), reads the forest that recurs across European fairy tales, the wood Hansel and Gretel are abandoned in, the wood Little Red Riding Hood must cross, as a symbol of the unknown and of a psychologically necessary confrontation with what lies outside the safety of home, a reading specific to Bettelheim's own psychoanalytic approach to folklore rather than to dreams as such. Jungian dream interpretation separately treats a dreamed forest as shadow territory, unconscious material not yet integrated into conscious awareness. Both are attributed interpretive traditions; content-analysis research into actual reported dreams has not established that forest imagery carries a consistent meaning across dreamers.