What are emotion 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 emotions 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 emotions in dreams. See how you feel about emotions now, in your waking life.

Emotions are at the heart of most dreams. Dreaming is a two-part process of creating symbolic imagery and tying it to emotions, like two sides of a coin. However, some dreams appear to connect only with thoughts and thought processes.

Dreams trigger emotions that would otherwise stay bottled up or unexpressed. So in that sense, dreams provide venting, as a volcano vents to release pressure. By releasing emotions during a dream, you might avoid a blowup while awake.

Dreams can trigger strong emotions like rage, terror, love, and ecstasy. Experiencing these emotions while dreaming doesn’t necessarily mean you feel them in your waking life, but it’s a good indication you feel something similar or could feel that way under certain circumstances. In dreams the gloves come off, your inhibitions come down, and the emotional centers of your brain light up.

So you might not feel rage in your waking life, for example, but if you dream about it, something could be pushing you in that direction, and if the situation is left unaddressed you could find yourself in a rage. You might not feel ecstatic, but maybe you feel really happy—or could feel that way under the right circumstances. The potential is there.

For example, a young man dreams he’s back in high school and is told he won’t graduate. He asks the teacher for help but the answers confuse him. He reacts with rage and tosses desks around the classroom, then stalks off to track down the school counselor, knowing that the counselor is somehow responsible for his predicament.

The dream summarizes a situation he’s in. He graduated a few years back and has been directionless since then. He doesn’t know what to do with his life, and no adults are providing answers, as symbolized in the dream by confusing answers from the teacher and looking for the school counselor, meaning someone to guide him. The rage felt in the dream is a raw, honest expression of his emotions, and it’s shown in how he reacts so strongly. His life is wasting away, and he knows it. After analyzing and understanding the dream, he resolves it by joining the Navy.

One of the golden rules of dream interpretation is that dreams exaggerate. They do so to get your attention as they express the underlying dynamics of a situation.

For example, you are buried with work and dream that you are buried alive. Being buried alive is a much worse situation than being buried at work, of course, but in an exaggerated way it expresses your emotions. Many dreams can be interpreted simply by relating the emotions they trigger with your waking life and gauging the strength of your reaction.

For example, when being buried alive elicits a mild reaction, you can bet the symbolism connects with something that’s just the way things are. Perhaps being buried in work is just par for the course. Hell, maybe you enjoy it!

When you react strongly to a situation in a dream, it’s a good indicator that it symbolizes something you feel strongly about, something that arouses powerful emotions in you.

For example, a female dreams about a drink spilling on her mattress during sex while a condom is being put on. She flies off in a rage and kicks her partner out. Her reaction shows that she feels very strongly about what the spilled drink symbolizes: the possibility of accidentally getting pregnant. It only takes a little bit of spilled semen to get her pregnant.

Her reaction reveals that she subconsciously knows the meaning of the symbolism of the spilled drink. Otherwise, why react so strongly to something that on the surface appears innocuous? Her emotional reaction reveals the meaning of the symbolism, and in turn reveals the meaning of the dream.

Colors in dreams have strong correlation with emotions. A rule of thumb is that colors signify related emotions. Bob Hoss’s work in this area is terrific; you can find it by searching online for “Bob Hoss dreams color.” And see: Colors.

Feelings are not synonymous with emotions. How you feel about something is a value judgment, not an emotion, but emotion is felt in the body, so in that sense “feel” is appropriate. The list of entries below includes some entries better classified as feelings.

See also: Anger, Anxiety, Ascending, Boats, Body parts, Bombs, Colors, Crying, Depression, Descending, Dolphins, Drowning, Elevators, Emptiness, Erupting, Fear, Fighting, Guilty, Hats, Jealousy, Joy, Insanity, Love, Numb, Octopus, Pain, Panic, Psychologists, Rage, Revenge, Screaming, Wounds

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.