Door

In the interpretation of dreams, Door is among the recurring images that traditional dream-books and modern depth psychology have alike tried to read. It is commonly interpreted as opportunity, transition, choice, or access to the unknown.

Common readings

A door is generally read as a threshold: an opening onto a new phase, a choice to be made, or access to what has been shut away.

Cross-Cultural and Historical Readings

Freud's reading of doors and openings as figures for the body, set out in the symbolism chapter of The Interpretation of Dreams, is presented as close to self-evident within his own framework rather than derived from any prior tradition. Arnold van Gennep's early twentieth-century analysis of rites of passage as structured around a liminal, threshold phase gave later popular psychology a vocabulary, liminality, freely applied to dream doors even though his subject was waking ritual, not dreaming. The two-faced Roman god Janus, associated with doorways and transitions, gave Western culture its most durable mythological figure for the threshold, though no ancient source ties him specifically to dream interpretation.

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.

A door is the smallest piece of architecture with a whole symbolism attached, because it is not a place but a passage. The comparative study of ritual has made the threshold a technical term: rites of passage, in the account descending from Arnold van Gennep, turn on crossing from one state to another through a marked between, and doorways have collected guardians, blessings and observances in most cultures, from household gods at Roman doorposts to the mezuzah on a Jewish doorframe. Dream interpreters inherit all of that when a door appears.

The psychological traditions read the door by its state. Open, it is opportunity, invitation or the next necessary step; closed, it divides into the locked door, which is refusal or a secret, and the merely shut one, which asks only to be tried. Doors that multiply down a corridor, doors that open onto nothing and the door the dreamer cannot find again are recurring reported forms, each pulling the reading its own way. Freud's school added its characteristic bodily reading of openings, which belongs to that theory.

The folk dictionaries read doors toward callers, offers and news. Across every register the constant is the same: the door means nothing in itself, and everything by what stands on the other side and whether the dreamer turns the handle.