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

The possibilities for symbolism and personal meaning involving family in dreams are endless. This entry will cover the overall symbolism of family. Use the entries listed below to look up individual members.

When a dream refers to the concept of family or subjects connected with your overall family, it is likely to show scenes with your entire family or at least the ones closest to you, instead of just individual family members. However, individual members of a family clan can symbolize the entire clan, especially the youngest or oldest members.

Dreams about family members can relate to roles played in it and the associated expectations, responsibilities, feelings, and so on. The role you play can be limiting or expanding, debilitating, or uplifting. You can be the glue in the family, or the black sheep, a matron or a patron, a good role model or not. You can carry on family traditions or defy them. You can be the high achiever, the breadwinner, the goat, the joker.

Your family and your role in it is a deep root running through your life. It’s the foundation of who you are, assuming you have a family, and dreams connect the past with the present to show you not only what’s happening now, but how it’s rooted in what happened then.

Family is the biggest influence on character and personality for most people. It shapes self-image and in many cases determines choices related to school, career, marriage, friends, beliefs, and geographic location, to name a few.

Even years after moving away, you can still be greatly influenced by your family. You can be ninety years old and still dream about being back in your childhood home. See: Childhood homes, Family homes

You can dream about recent interactions with family members and news you have heard about them, especially if you are affected personally by the experience. It’s common to dream about family members when you miss or need them, or something happens with them that is “big,” such as marriage, divorce, pregnancy, or illness. Usually they’re depicted as themselves, and sometimes as surrogate characters.

A dream gives clues and hints to identify surrogate characters or something about them. For example, you hear news that your sister, who lives in another country, has a drug problem, and subsequently dream about a burglar breaking into her room in the family home and stealing her childhood toys, symbolizing your perception that she has lost her innocence. The burglar symbolizes her addiction.

Changes in your relationship with your family can spark dreams. For example, a woman dreams that she serves eggs sunny side up to her family members. The short snippet stands out to her as important. And it is important because she’s going through some big changes in her relationship with her family. She no longer wants to maintain the “sunny” facade she’s been projecting. Even when ill, depressed, or sad, she serves her eggs sunny side up. It’s a metaphor with deep meaning and significance for her.

Dreams can use family members to make connections between their personality and character and yours. Are you stoic like your father, or organized like your mother? Are you jealous of your sister? Do you have your uncle’s sense of humor, or share with your cousin the same propensity to choose mates who aren’t good for you?

A dream with imaginary family members can symbolize sides of yourself trying to integrate into your personality. Your psyche is, in a sense, a family. It’s a collection of parts, not a singular “I.” Some parts are integrated with the conscious personality—in the family—and some are unconscious, dormant, or unwanted. The unwanted parts don’t fit into the ego’s picture of who you are. For example, see the example of the long-lost brother dream detailed in the entry for Brother.

Integration of internal parts and personal experiences is a primary function of dreams. See: Psyches

For example, a docile personality might have a hard time accepting the combative aspects of him- or herself. A high achiever can have difficulty with the parts of herself not goal-oriented and time conscious. These parts of the psyche can show up in dreams portrayed as family members of any sort, actual family or otherwise. It’s a way of promoting internal integration because family is close to you.

Family can mean “familiar,” or integral to who you are.

Family members can be used as a group in a dream to speak to something common to all of them.

For example, a young woman dreams that she dry humps a cousin as all of her other cousins watch. She feels revolted and very embarrassed, both during the dream and after remembering it. But the scene with her cousins is an expression of feeling that she has no privacy in her large family. She has many cousins close to her age and they’re all up in each other’s business. Everything she says and does becomes fodder for gossip and conversation, and she feels violated.

All of her cousins are present in the scene, which strongly suggests that the dream connects with her cousins in general, not any one of them specifically—not even the one in bed with her. It’s simply a way of creating a scenario that mirrors her feelings and illustrates a big issue.

Dreams about family gatherings with multiple family members are often about your place in your family, how they treat you, and how you are shaped by your experiences with them. The meaning and message are found in the big picture.

A young man dreams that his family and friends throw a birthday party for him at his aunt’s house. Various family members say things that are factually incorrect, but he blows it off. He notices plastic bags of red paint interspersed around the house, and they leak on him. But he just lets it happen and feels confused and embarrassed. The weird conversations continue and people talk nonsense, like they’re all in on the joke, but he’s not. Finally, he realizes he’s being tricked. The game is to see how long it takes him to speak up about the inaccuracies he notices. He plays along and laughs with them, but feels humiliated.

What a strange and beautiful dream. Dreams create scenarios that test your reactions and spark your emotions. The point is to show you something about yourself. This dream is showing the dreamer his feelings of insecurity. In waking life he tends to hold his tongue rather than speak his mind. He hates himself for it and lives with a feeling of regret and failure. Plus, a few months prior to his dream, his family held a surprise birthday at the same aunt’s house used as the setting in the dream and he felt very embarrassed by all the attention. He felt tricked, not surprised.

So the dream puts him in a scenario where he can speak up or be passive, and he chooses to be passive, even to play along with his humiliation and laugh uncomfortably about it. The red paint that spills on him symbolizes his embarrassment. The family members paint a big picture of the dreamer’s self-consciousness and passivity rooted in his family experience.

Family members can symbolize structures of your psyche such as archetypes. We are all born with a “Father” archetype and a “Mother” archetype that shape our ideas and expectations of what our parents are supposed to be like. Early in life they’re godlike figures.

As you get older your opinion of your parents is heavily influenced by how the reality of them compares with the archetypal blueprint. If they fail to live up to it, you can be deeply disappointed and disillusioned. Eventually, if you have children, your opinion of yourself as a parent will be influenced by how well you live up to those ideas and expectations.

As you step into the role of mother or father, the archetype charges with energy, and you find capabilities in yourself you didn’t know you possessed. In dreams, that occurrence can translate into your being visited by a mythological figure, an ancestor, or a talking animal like a “momma bear” that gives you advice about how to be a parent. See: Ancestors

Archetypal-like figures can appear in dreams to represent your parents, though they are more likely in the dreams of children. For adults, parents tend to be portrayed more realistically.

Dreams use depictions of family members tied to the roles they play in the family and connect these roles with your life. For example, you’re likely to dream about your parents when figuring out how to be one yourself. Your parents are the closest example you’re likely to have when you are a new mother or father, and it is common to dream about them under those circumstances.

Family in dreams can symbolize other senses of the word, such as how friends, workmates, and teammates can be like family. In simplest terms, family means close ties or proximity between people, and organization under a hierarchical structure.

Important people in your life can play family-like roles. A beloved teacher can be like a parent, for example. The similarity shows the strength of the connection.

Euphemisms can be used for family, such as “Mafia,” which organize into Mafia “families.” Work organizations like to call themselves families, so you could dream about a family when you are actually dreaming about your workplace. Church and military organizations, too, like to refer to themselves as families.

See also: Ancestors, Blood, Brothers, Children, Childhood homes, Children, Family homes, Fathers, Guiding, Incest, Love, Mafia, Mothers, Nephews, Orphans, Sisters

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.