In the interpretation of dreams, Ghost is among the recurring images that traditional dream-books and modern depth psychology have alike tried to read. It is commonly interpreted as the past, unresolved matters, memory, and what haunts the mind.
Common readings
A ghost is generally read as the return of the past, an unresolved matter, a memory or a regret that continues to haunt the dreamer.
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.
Dreams of the dead are documented across many unrelated cultures as a recognised category of experience, treated in some traditions, including strands of Talmudic dream literature, as genuine visitations rather than as symbolic content to be decoded, a distinction worth holding onto: not every tradition that takes a ghost dream seriously reads it symbolically at all. Jung, by contrast, reads a dreamed ghost or dead figure as an image arising from the personal or collective unconscious, tied to unresolved grief or to material the dreamer has not yet integrated, a specifically twentieth-century psychological framework distinct from the older traditions that treat such dreams as literal contact with the deceased.