What did your dream mean?

People have been reading dreams for as long as we have records of people at all. Temple priests in Mesopotamia kept dream omen tablets; the Greeks slept in sanctuaries hoping for healing dreams; and every folk tradition since has kept its own dictionary of what snakes, teeth, and rising water are supposed to mean. What changed in the last century is the lens. Freud read dreams as disguised wishes. Jung saw them as letters from the deeper self, written in a symbolic language we half remember. Modern sleep science adds a third view: during REM sleep the brain replays, sorts, and emotionally files the day's experience — and dreams may be what that filing feels like from the inside.

None of these views hands you a fixed code. The same symbol can carry opposite meanings for two dreamers: an ocean is freedom to a sailor and fear to someone who nearly drowned. That's why a useful interpretation starts from your telling of the dream — which details you volunteered, which feelings you woke with — rather than from a lookup table alone.

Our interpreter works that way. It reads your description, identifies the symbols you actually mentioned, and weighs the traditional meanings against the emotional temperature of your account. You get a short summary, the symbols it noticed, a reading of the feelings underneath, and one question worth carrying into your day. It's a mirror, not a prophecy: dreams reflect what you're living, and the person best placed to finish the interpretation is you.

If you'd rather browse than ask, the dream dictionary below covers the classics — the dreams almost everyone reports at some point — with the common variations of each one.