DreamloreDream dictionary › Common dreams › Death
What does it mean to dream about death?
Dreaming that someone has died, or that you have, can stay with you all day. Here is what two old books say about these dreams, quoted exactly; if you are grieving, read them gently and as history, not as a message.
What Miller wrote (1901)
To dream of seeing any of your people dead, warns you of coming dissolution or sorrow. … Dreams relating to death or dying, unless they are due to spiritual causes, are misleading and very confusing to the novice in dream lore when he attempts to interpret them. … In our dreams we are closer to our real self than in waking life.
Read the full entry for “Death” →
To dream of the dead, is usually a dream of warning.
Read the full entry for “Dead” →
What Freud wrote
Another series of dreams which might be called typical are those which have the content that a dear relative, parent, brother, or sister, child or the like, has died. Two classes of these dreams must immediately be distinguished—those in which the dreamer remains unaffected by sorrow while dreaming, and those in which he feels profound grief on account of the death, in which he even expresses this grief during sleep by fervid tears.
Your dream is not a dictionary entry
A dream about death comes with a place, other people and a feeling, and the old books read the same image very differently depending on those details. Dreamlore takes your whole dream, spoken or typed, finds the passages that fit it in Miller and Freud, quotes them word for word, and leaves you one question to reflect on. The journal stays on your phone.
Read your own dream in DreamloreFull dictionary entries
Questions
What does it mean to dream about death?
Miller's 1901 dictionary calls dreams of the dead usually a warning, but also says dreams about death are misleading and confusing to interpret. Freud separated dreams of a loved one's death into those where the dreamer feels no sorrow and those where the dreamer grieves. Neither reading is a statement about anyone's future.
Where do these quotes come from?
They are quoted verbatim from public-domain books: Gustavus Hindman Miller's Ten Thousand Dreams Interpreted (1901) and Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (translated by A. A. Brill, 1913). Each quote on this page is checked word for word against the source text before the page is served, the same check the Dreamlore app runs on every quote it shows.
Other common dreams
Dream about teeth falling outDream about snakesDream about being chasedDream about fallingDream about flyingDream about water or drowningDream about being pregnantDream about spidersDream about a houseDream about a carDream about fireDream about a babyDream about your partner cheatingDream about a weddingDream about school or examsDream about a tornado or stormDream about a dogDream about being naked
Dreamlore and these pages are for reflection and curiosity. The books quoted here are old — Miller wrote in 1901 and his entries read as omens, and many of Freud's ideas are disputed today. Take them as a starting point for thinking about your own dream, not as prediction or advice.