In the interpretation of dreams, Key is among the recurring images that traditional dream-books and modern depth psychology have alike tried to read. It is commonly interpreted as solutions, access, secrets, and the unlocking of potential.
Common readings
A key is commonly read as the answer to a problem, access to something shut away, or the unlocking of a hidden capacity.
Cross-Cultural and Historical Readings
Freud's reading of keys and locks as sexual symbols, keys standing for the male and locks the female, is offered in his own text as one of a larger catalogue of such correspondences he considered nearly universal, a confidence later psychoanalytic writers have not uniformly shared. Keys carry unrelated symbolic weight in waking religious tradition: Matthew's image of Peter receiving "the keys of the kingdom of heaven" gave Western Christian art and papal iconography a durable emblem of authority to bind and loose, still visible in the crossed-keys symbol associated with the papacy. In Greek religion the goddess Hecate was frequently invoked as keeper of keys to the underworld and to crossroads, material dream dictionaries draw on without naming the source.
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.