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

Friends are among the most common dream characters, and have widely varied possibilities for symbolism. The characters can be friends you know, or they can be inventions of a dream that are portrayed as friends. This difference is the place to begin the interpretation process.

When you dream about friends who are people you know, the dream might connect with a recent interaction with a person, a situation or circumstance, or something you heard. Many dreams connect with events of the previous day or two, or in anticipation of the day ahead, so if you were with a friend, plan to be together, or the person was on your mind, it’s a good bet that it’s related to his or her appearance in your dream.

For example, a friend borrows money from you and you wonder when you’re going to get paid back. It’s no big deal, but there’s a little voice in your head raising questions. Then you dream that you receive a letter from the friend with a check inside, reflecting your thoughts about being paid back and a hunch that it’ll happen soon. Now you can rest easier.

Friends in dreams can connect with ongoing situations and circumstances, too. For example, an ongoing situation is depicted in a dream about a friend throwing firebombs into a crowd. It symbolizes that friend’s habit of throwing verbal bombs and getting people riled up.

Dream characters that are presented as friends but do not resemble someone you know can be surrogates for friends. A surrogate is used as a storytelling device to create psychological distance and avoid arousing strong emotions or reactions that would disturb your sleep or make the story veer off course. Surrogates can be used to represent people you know yet look nothing like them. Oftentimes they’re identified by occupation, actions, or some other distinguishing feature or characteristic, including physical characteristics such as hair color or style.

For example, a young man dreams that he goes to school on the bus, gets off, and while walking into school he’s stabbed in the back by someone who’s supposed to be a friend. The day before the dream, a friend betrayed him, figuratively stabbing him in the back. And while the surrogate character in the dream does not look like that friend who betrayed him, they are one and the same.

Invented friends in dreams can symbolize the subject of friendship, desire for it, or friendship skills.

Potentially, a multitude of everyday situations with friends can be dreamed about, if you consider the dynamics of friendship and the widely varied areas of life it involves. The dreams you’re most likely to remember, however, are the ones that involve strong emotions or feelings. Those are usually pretty easy to connect with what was on our mind or in your heart the day or two before the dream.

When a strong reaction is provoked in a dream, it’s connected with something you feel strongly about, and it could be about a friend portrayed in the dream. But keep in mind that most dreams are about your inner life, and most dream characters represent something about you and your life.

Consider also that the friend in your dream can symbolize something you feel strongly about other than that person, such as the place where you live or work together. This sort of dream can be identified at times by an overreaction. For example, you dream that a friend from work is a couple of minutes late coming over to your house, and you’re furious. You’d never actually get furious about such a thing if it really happened. On the other hand, you are really mad about a writeup you got at work for being two minutes late. In which case, the friend symbolizes the place where you work together and has nothing to do with being angry with that friend. You react angrily because you know while dreaming what the friend represents.

Jealousy and envy are two strong emotions that can come out in relation to friends. A common theme in cheating dreams involves your close friend sleeping with your significant other. Often, it reflects jealousy or wariness about how they interact. Perhaps they’re a little too friendly for your comfort, or you see—or think you see—some sort of romantic spark between them. Or you’re insecure and project your thoughts and feelings onto the dream characters.

That’s an important fact for understanding dream characters, because most of the time they are reflections of something about you, not about the person—friend or otherwise—portrayed as a character.

Friends in dreams can symbolize something you know about the person—distinct characteristics, traits, or qualities, among other things. Often you can decode the symbolism simply by pulling thoughts about the person off the top of your head. See the example about a guy giving birth to a friend’s baby in the entry for Childbirth.

Or you have a friend who is good at meeting new people, and you are reserved. The friend is then used in a dream as a symbol for gregariousness. If you want to be more gregarious, you can learn from the friend’s example. The same idea applies to dating skills.

A young man dreams that his best friend hits on all the girls he likes, then has sex with them. The dream is an answer to the young man’s question, How do I get the girls I like to like me? And the answer is, learn from your friend, the one who is good with the ladies.

The key to decoding the symbolism is found in the dreamer’s feelings while watching his friend pick up the girls. He admires his skills while lamenting is his own lack of them. If he’d reacted angrily, it might indicate stronger feelings behind the symbolism. As in, maybe his friend is the sort of jerk who deliberately spites the dreamer by targeting girls he likes.

Friendly dream characters can represent aspects of yourself. The character is presented as a friend because it portrays a part of yourself that is in some way like a friend—helpful, close, interesting, comforting. Your psyche is a collective, and some parts are independent of you and outside the control of the ego. Those parts make their own decisions and have their own viewpoints. They can be portrayed as friends or enemies depending on your relationship with them. And the real key point here is they’re all you.

Parts of yourself can play the role of friends. This meaning of the symbolism is especially likely if you have been feeling lonely or isolated. Dreams can act as compensation for something missing in your life, and if you need a friend your dreams can provide it. See: Compensation

Another detail to notice is whether a friend-character is in your dream individually or as part of a group. Individually, friends in dreams tend to symbolize what you see about the friend in yourself, your recent interaction, or related thoughts and feelings. As a group, friends tend to symbolize something related to the subject of friendship. It’s only a rule of thumb, a place to begin asking the questions. See: Groups

You can dream about a waking-life situation or circumstance with a friend, but the friend is not pictured in the dream. For example, say you have an argument with a friend, then dream about yelling at a brick wall. The friend is not in the dream but is instead symbolized by the brick wall because arguing with the person is like yelling at a brick wall!

If the friend in the dream is someone from the past, see: Old Friend.

See also: Giving birth, Compensation, Facebook, Groups, Guiding, Old friends

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.