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Church in dreams: what it can mean

  • Places
  • Family

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The short answer

A church can mean faith, family ritual, comfort, guilt or community, depending on the dreamer. Many people connect it with a search for meaning or with a moment of change in the family.

Your dream is not everyone's

Tell it the way you remember it. You get a reading about your dream and your life, not a dictionary entry.

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Three ways to read it

Psychology and research

Research

The continuity view reads places in dreams through the dreamer's own experience. For someone who goes to church, it may be a familiar and safe place; for someone who does not, it may carry weddings, funerals, childhood memories or unresolved questions. The people who were there and what happened inside usually say more than the building.

Classic texts

History

In Genesis, Jacob dreams of a ladder reaching to heaven, and on waking he names the place Bethel, the house of God, and marks it with a stone. The story links a dream to the founding of a sacred place, a theme found in many traditions.

Folk tradition

Tradition, not science

Tradition: American popular dream books, around 1900

Miller's 1901 dream dictionary read a church seen in the distance as a sign of disappointed hopes, and entering a church as a more sombre sign. These are old popular readings, given as history rather than prediction, and they say nothing about anyone's faith.

Questions to ask yourself

  1. What does a church mean to you when you are awake?
  2. Who was with you there, and why had you come?
  3. Is there a question of meaning or belonging on your mind right now?

Related symbols

Sources

Every reading on this page comes from these works. Page references have not all been checked yet; those still waiting are marked.

  1. G. William Domhoff (2001). A New Neurocognitive Theory of Dreams. Dreaming 11(1): 13-33.

    cited, not reproduced

    • Cited at: pp. 13-33 (dreams as simulations of personal concerns) (reference not yet checked)

    Dreams as embodied simulations of personal concerns (the continuity view). The backbone of our psychology lens.

  2. Calvin S. Hall, Robert L. Van de Castle (1966). The Content Analysis of Dreams. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.

    cited, not reproduced

    • Cited at: coding categories: settings and characters (reference not yet checked)

    The standard coding system for dream content (characters, social interactions, misfortunes, emotions, settings, objects) and its normative sample.

  3. Hebrew Bible (1611). Genesis, in The Holy Bible (King James Version).

    public domain

    • Cited at: Genesis 28:10-19 (reference not yet checked)

    Quoted from the public-domain King James Version.

  4. Gustavus Hindman Miller (1901). What's in a Dream (later reissued as Ten Thousand Dreams Interpreted).

    public domain

    • Cited at: entry: Church (reference not yet checked)

    An American popular dream dictionary. Its entries are written as omens ("foretells"); we only report how people once read a symbol, never as a forecast.