Mother

In the interpretation of dreams, Mother is among the recurring images that traditional dream-books and modern depth psychology have alike tried to read. It is commonly interpreted as nurture, origin, security, and the source of care and life.

Common readings

The mother figure is read as an image of nurture and origin, of security, and, in Jungian terms, of one of the deepest and most powerful of the archetypes.

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 mother's aspect in the dream does the work: nurturing, absent, ill, angry, dead or restored to life. Dreams of a living mother in danger are usually read first as ordinary attachment and worry, and dreams of a dead mother returned belong to the visitation pattern, with its characteristic vividness and consolation. Interpreters distinguish the personal mother from the maternal as such, asking whether the dream is about her or about mothering, being held, fed, controlled or released, wherever the dreamer currently receives or refuses it.

The single most notorious passage in ancient dream interpretation concerns the mother. Artemidorus gives the dream of intercourse with one's mother one of the longest discussions in the Oneirocritica, distinguishing case after case and reading many of them favourably: the mother, he explains, can signify one's country, one's trade and the earth itself, so that for a politician or an exile the dream may promise standing or return. The passage matters here not for its conclusions but for its method, the mother read as the great symbol of origin, land and belonging rather than as a person only, and for the reminder that ancient interpreters were far less shockable than their modern readers.

Depth psychology made the mother its central figure. Freud set the Oedipal bond at the base of his whole theory, and dream mothers in his school are read with that weight. Jung broke with him partly over exactly this, arguing the mother of dream and myth is more than the personal parent: his essay on the psychological aspects of the mother archetype ranges her images from the nurturing to the devouring, and Erich Neumann's The Great Mother catalogued the type across cultures, womb and tomb together.

The working readings inherit the split: the dream mother as the actual woman, with the dreamer's history supplying the sense, or as origin and care itself, wherever those now operate. The traditions are recorded here as traditions, the ancient one included.