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Fire in dreams: what it can mean

  • Fear and danger
  • Nature
  • Change

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The short answer

Fire in dreams can warm, destroy or transform. Dreamers often link it with anger, passion, urgency, or something that needs to end so something else can start.

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Three ways to read it

Psychology and research

Research

Fire is a vivid, high-arousal image, and the continuity view asks what in your waking life feels heated or urgent. Uncontrolled fire often shows up with stress, conflict or anger, sometimes anger you have not expressed. A contained fire, like a hearth or a candle, is more often linked with warmth or longing. Distressing fire dreams, like other disturbing dreams, tend to increase with stress and difficult emotions.

Folk tradition

Tradition, not science

Tradition: American popular dream books, around 1900

Dream books around 1900 often read fire as favourable when the dreamer was not burned, and as trouble when it destroyed their home. This is folklore rather than prediction.

Questions to ask yourself

  1. Was the fire destroying something, warming you, or out of control?
  2. What in your life feels heated, urgent or ready to burn out?
  3. Is there anger or passion you have been holding back?

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. Ross Levin, Tore A. Nielsen (2007). Disturbed dreaming, posttraumatic stress disorder, and affect distress: A review and neurocognitive model. Psychological Bulletin 133(3): 482-528.

    cited, not reproduced

    • Cited at: pp. 482-528 (distressing dreams and emotional distress) (reference not yet checked)

    Nightmares and distressing dreams in relation to fear processing and emotional distress.

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

    public domain

    • Cited at: entry: Fire (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.