Choose a language

Door in dreams: what it can mean

  • Places
  • Change
  • New beginnings

DraftAn editor has not reviewed this page yet.

The short answer

Doors are about entering, leaving and what is kept out. Many dreamers connect a locked door with a closed opportunity and an open one with an invitation they are unsure about.

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.

Your text stays in this browser until you send it.

Three ways to read it

Psychology and research

Research

Dreams build their settings from ordinary places, and doors mark the edge between spaces. On the continuity view, a door that will not open, will not lock, or opens onto the wrong room mirrors waking concerns about access, privacy and safety. Being locked up appears among the typical themes people report. Pay attention to which side of the door you were on.

Classic texts

History

Freud read rooms and their doors, openings and entrances as symbols, often sexual ones, in his section on dream symbolism. Later research has not supported a fixed symbol list, but his wider point, that houses and rooms in dreams can stand for the self and its private parts, remains a question many people find useful.

Questions to ask yourself

  1. Were you trying to get in, get out, or keep something out?
  2. What opportunity or relationship feels open or closed to you right now?
  3. Who has a key to your life that you did not choose to give?

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. Tore A. Nielsen, Antonio L. Zadra, Valérie Simard, Sébastien Saucier, Philippe Stenstrom, Carlyle Smith, Don Kuiken (2003). The typical dreams of Canadian university students. Dreaming 13(4): 211-235.

    cited, not reproduced

    • Cited at: typical dreams questionnaire, results (reference not yet checked)

    Survey of how many people report having had common dream themes (being chased, falling, teeth, flying, exams, nakedness and others) at least once.

  3. Sigmund Freud (1913). The Interpretation of Dreams, translated by A. A. Brill. New York: Macmillan.

    first published 1900

    public domain

    • Cited at: Ch. VI, section E (representation by symbols) (reference not yet checked)

    First English translation, of the third German edition. Public domain; scholars consider it looser than the later Strachey translation, which is copyrighted.