Death

In the interpretation of dreams, Death is among the recurring images that traditional dream-books and modern depth psychology have alike tried to read. It is commonly interpreted as endings and transformation rather than literal death, a phase closing.

Common readings

Interpreters across traditions caution against reading a death dream literally; it is far more often taken as the ending of a chapter and the clearing of ground for what comes next.

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

Who dies in the dream governs the reading. One's own death, the death of a parent or child, and the death of a stranger are handled as three different images, and the dream's emotional register, terror, calm or even relief, is weighed alongside the event. Interpreters in the psychological traditions are careful to separate dreams of dying from dreams of the already dead, who tend to appear in visitation dreams with a very different, often consoling, character. Literal prediction is the one reading the modern traditions decline.

The dream traditions are unusually united on death: almost none of them read it literally. Artemidorus interpreted dream death most often as change, of household, occupation or condition, since the dead man leaves his former life entire, and the Greek handbook tradition read death and marriage as mirrored images of one another, each a departure from one state into another. The folk dictionaries kept the same instinct in the blunter rule that dreams go by contraries, reading a death toward long life or news of a birth.

Freud gave the image its most uncomfortable modern treatment. In The Interpretation of Dreams he examined the typical dream of a loved one's death and traced it, where it was accompanied by grief, to childhood death wishes long outgrown and repressed, a reading that belongs entirely to his theory and stands or falls with it. Jungian writers read dream death as the psyche's word for an ending already underway, something in the dreamer's life completing itself so that something else can begin.

Bereavement research adds the visitation dream, in which the recently dead appear alive, usually calm and often consoling. These are among the best documented of all dream experiences and are reported across cultures; the traditions differ on what they are, but not on how much they matter to the people who have them.