What are embracing dreams about?

You can gain insight from thinking about any dream, no matter how strange. Only you, as the dreamer, have final say on what your dream may or may not mean. Each dream is unique.

The DreamWell dictionary provides information on how each dream symbol appears in dreams in general. Finding how experience embracing in dreams can be a key to understanding its meaning.

Our emotions in dreams can help us understand its meaning. Pay attention to how you felt in the dream. Pay attention to how you feel about embracing in dreams. See how you feel about embracing now, in your waking life.

Getting or receiving a hug in a dream can symbolize closeness and connection with a person. It can be a sign of harmony between people.

For example, a woman dreams about deeply embracing her elderly and beloved grandmother, who is dressed and packed to go away on a long trip. They express their love for each other before grandma departs. In the morning, the woman gets news that her grandmother passed away peacefully during the night.

Hugging someone represented as a dream character can mean you miss the person, especially if you haven’t had contact in a while.

Hugging someone you have had difficulty or problems with can be a sign of putting aside your differences. The feelings you experience during the dream and afterward should be easy to connect with the meaning of the hug.

Hugging can express strong concern for a person. For example, a mom hasn’t heard from her young adult son in a few days as he’s traveling overseas. She knows he’s probably just having a great time, but she’s a mom and she worries. Just before bed she gets an email from him—he’s fine, having a great time—and that night she dreams about deeply embracing her son and feeling relieved.

A dream character can represent something about you, so hugging a character can symbolize getting closer to, or embracing, yourself. However, the character is not likely to look like you. Instead, it’s a projection that depicts something about you. For example, you struggle with yourself over being eccentric, but come to realize you like that side of yourself. It is then symbolized in a dream as hugging Marilyn Manson, an eccentric musician who doesn’t care what anyone thinks of him.

Along similar lines, a hug in a dream can symbolize being close to a subject or situation. It can mean you embrace it. For example, you have the impression you’re no good at math, but a math teacher persuades you to give it your best shot, and you dream about it as embracing the teacher. You’re really embracing the subject.

As you can see by now, hugging in a dream is likely to be a physical representation of a personal situation. It’s an action that can be an expression of feeling or symbolize other definitions of the words hug and embrace. You can embrace a new idea or culture. You can embrace death. In these senses, embrace means the opposite of reject or deny. It means “accept.”

For example, you are distressed that a dear friend is moving out of town, but you know it’s for the best. Embracing the friend in a dream could symbolize accepting the move. People often embrace before parting ways.

Embracing in a dream can be a sign of close emotional connection with a person, or a wish for it, especially if the dream character embraced depicts someone you know.

Hugging can express romantic feelings and intentions.

It can be a way of “feeling out” the situation.

In a dream, embracing a person you know can mean you embrace something about the person, such as embracing their beliefs or ideas. For example, a woman who is agnostic has a friend who is a true believer. Through the friend’s influence, the woman is realizing her problem is actually with religion, and God is something separate. She dreams about embracing her friend outside a church, symbolizing how she’s not quite ready to embrace the friend’s spiritual life—she’s outside the church, not in it—but is rethinking her beliefs and appreciates her friend’s influence.

In Freudian tradition, embracing is viewed as expressing desire for sexual union, but it’s only true in a small minority of dreams. Even when sexual feelings and situations accompany embracing in a dream, the likelihood is you are embracing and integrating something about yourself. The character you embrace is a projection from your inner world.

Because arms are used to embrace, they can symbolize ideas related to embracing without actually physically acting it out. For example, you dream that an ex-spouse is in the hospital and has no arms. It symbolizes that the affectionate feelings you once had for the person are gone. Arms are needed to embrace. No arms, no embrace. See: Arms

More possibilities to consider are that dreaming about an embrace, especially one that makes you feel good, is compensation for a lack of intimacy, contact, and affection in your life. Dreams can give you what you are missing in your waking life. If you feel isolated or unloved, your dreams might fill the void.

Embracing can symbolize forming an alliance or bond. If you see people embrace and you feel left out, you might feel left out of some other situation in your life. For example, you dream about a classmate embracing your teacher, and the dream connects with your feeling that the teacher gives preference to the classmate.

A hug that’s too tight can symbolize something that you can’t let go of, or that won’t let go of you.

Cuddling is associated with how people fit together, and in dreams, fitting together can mean how personality, character, and other aspects of people fit together.

A man going through a divorce dreams about being in bed with his wife and cuddling. Suddenly, he feels movement down by his feet and looks down. He sees snakes in his bed. The dream sums up the situation with his (soon to be) ex-wife. The two of them are divorcing. They’ve been amicable and even close, as symbolized by cuddling. But her family is telling her to get mean and make the divorce hell to get every penny out of him that she can. Their “poisonous influence” and “venomous behavior” is symbolized by the snakes.

See also: Arms, Emotions, Escaping, Lips, Love

This interpretation is from ""The Dream Interpretation Dictionary: Symbols, Signs, and Meanings" and is provided by J.M. DeBord aka "RadOwl". He is the author of several acclaimed books about dreaming, the host of The Dreams That Shape Us podcast, and is a moderator of r/Dreams, one of the largest dream sharing communities on the internet.