In the interpretation of dreams, Moon is among the recurring images that traditional dream-books and modern depth psychology have alike tried to read. It is commonly interpreted as intuition, the feminine, cycles, emotion, and the hidden.
Common readings
The moon is widely read as an image of intuition, of cyclical change and of the feeling and hidden life, set against the daylight clarity of the sun.
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.
What changes the reading
The moon's phase and behaviour carry the reading. A full moon, a new moon, an eclipse and a moon that is wrong in some way, too large, too near, doubled, are treated as distinct images, and dreams of the moon reflected in water are noted for putting the emphasis on reflection itself. Because the moon governs no daylight, interpreters tend to read what happens under it as belonging to the inward and periodic side of life, and they ask what in the dreamer's waking world is waxing, waning or briefly darkened.