In the interpretation of dreams, Mountain is among the recurring images that traditional dream-books and modern depth psychology have alike tried to read. It is commonly interpreted as obstacles, ambition, achievement, and a higher perspective.
Common readings
The mountain is read at once as a great obstacle to be surmounted and as the ambition and achievement of reaching a height and a wider view.
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 historian of religion Mircea Eliade, in The Sacred and the Profane (1957), describes the mountain as a recurring axis mundi across unrelated world traditions, a cosmic centre-point connecting earth to sky, cited in religious contexts from Mount Meru in Hindu and Buddhist cosmology to Mount Sinai in the Hebrew Bible. Jung separately reads the mountain, when it appears in dreams, as an image of the individuation process, the difficult ascent toward psychic wholeness, a specifically Jungian gloss rather than a universal claim. Both readings are genuine, attributed scholarly positions; neither is evidence that a dreamed mountain carries a fixed meaning for a given dreamer outside the interpretive framework being applied.