Money

In the interpretation of dreams, Money is among the recurring images that traditional dream-books and modern depth psychology have alike tried to read. It is commonly interpreted as self-worth, value, power, security, and personal resources.

Common readings

Money in dreams is often read less as literal wealth than as a measure of self-worth, security, or the resources, inner and outer, the dreamer feels able to draw on.

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

What the money does in the dream matters more than its presence. Finding it, losing it, counting it, being robbed of it, discovering it is counterfeit or trying to pay with money that will not be accepted are the standard variants, each read as a different statement about worth and security. Interpreters ask whose money it is and what it fails or succeeds in buying. Since money is also the plainest waking worry there is, the psychological traditions rule in ordinary financial anxiety before reading the image as anything subtler.

Money in dreams embarrassed nobody until psychoanalysis got to it. Freud's school, beginning from his 1908 paper on character and anal erotism, bound money in theory to the body's earliest economy, and read dream gold and coin through that link, pointing for support to the folklore in which the devil's gold turns overnight to dung and to the German idiom of the Dukatenscheisser. The reading is the school's own, recorded here as such, but the folklore it cited is real and old: treasure that will not keep its value at daylight runs through European tale collections.

The older dream dictionaries read money with the tradesman's directness they brought to everything, finding coins toward gain or, by the rule of contraries, toward loss, counterfeit toward false friends, borrowed money toward obligation. Their instinct that dream money is about worth survived them.

The modern composite reading runs on that line: money as the portable form of value, so that dreams of finding, losing, counting or being robbed of it are read as statements about self worth, security and what the dreamer has to spend, in effort, love or standing, and on whom. Interpreters add the sensible floor that money is also the plainest waking anxiety there is, and a dream ledger may be balancing nothing deeper than the month's accounts. The readings are conventions of their traditions, and they disagree exactly as much as the traditions do.