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

Dreams make metaphors, and hell can be a poignant metaphor for describing your life or a situation. Do you ever catch yourself saying something like, “My life is hell,” or “I’m going to burn in hell for this.”

You hear a description of the misery or stress someone is going through and think the situation is comparable to being in hell.

Hell can be an apt way of describing emotions that torment you. See: Emotions

It can be a general symbol of fear, or be a metaphor for how fear makes life hell. See: Fear

Hell is associated with a place where bad people go, and it can be used in dreams to symbolize guilt, regret, or self-knowledge that you (or someone you know) have done something sinful or wrong. Hell is punishment, eternal torture for wrongdoing. You think you belong in hell. You’ve been a bad, bad boy or girl. You’re tortured by guilt over things real or imagined. This notion is common in the minds of people exposed to “hellfire and brimstone” dogma. See: Guilty, Torturing

Keep in mind, most dream characters are projections of something about you, so if a dream refers to a person in hell, it might be a projection of something about you or an aspect of yourself. For example, your lustful sex life that could land you in hell.

Hell is conceived as a place where people suffer the consequences of their actions, and that association can be used to create a story about consequences and taking responsibility for your actions. See: Courts

For example, a man dreams he’s in hell with members of a group he’s in that challenges beliefs and notions, akin to an encounter group. Hell is a huge stone quarry, and their job is to break rocks. He’s told by the group that anyone who tries to leave will be hunted down and vaporized by demons that exist unseen in guard towers surrounding the place.

One day he decides the demon guards don’t exist and he tries to leave, and ends up in a dark cave. There, he burrows through hell’s wall and is confronted by several pairs of glowing red eyes, like stoplights—the demons! He’s afraid and makes a right turn. A powerful, disembodied voice tells him, “Learn to take responsibility for the consequences of your actions!” He then slides uncontrollably and appears in daylight over a bottomless chasm, and the dream ends with him falling helplessly through open air.

In this metaphorical story, the walls of hell and the demon guards symbolize the beliefs and notions that keep a person imprisoned, unable to see beyond them, constrained. The guards are unseen because beliefs and notions are intangible. The man is learning to challenge them and leave them behind, symbolized as breaking rocks and burrowing through the wall of hell. The dark cave symbolizes the lonely personal place he finds himself in as he questions not only his beliefs and notions, but also those of his social group.

When this happens, constraints will make a final stand, symbolized as the red eyes appearing. They’re like stoplights because something inside the man wants him to stop and go back to the relative comfort and safety of his prison. He’s afraid. Instead he makes a right (correct) turn, meaning a turn in his journey of life, and absorbs the lesson that his unconscious mind, speaking through the powerful voice, is teaching him:

Take responsibility for the consequences of your actions!

Doing that means that the ground he’d based his life on disappears, as symbolized by free-falling, but it also means he will eventually find better ground to stand on. It’s a lesson that will stick with him for the rest of his life.

While hell is believed by some people to be a real place, an alternate conception of it is as a state of being cut off from God while alive in body. When translated to a personal situation, hell can mean a person is cut off from the goodness in him- or herself, or alienated from fellow humans.

Burning in hell can connect with a burning temper. Losing your temper can make you feel guilty. Guilt is associated with hell. The ideas all interconnect.

Dreaming about burning in hell might be a response to physical stimuli as you sleep. You could dream about being in hell when you have a high fever, your body is overheated, or you have the sweats. Or it might be in response to something you heard, especially if you have been exposed recently to religious notions about hell or a person’s beliefs about it.

Or the “heat is on,” meaning you are tense and under pressure.

See also: Darkness, Demons, Devils, Evil, Fires, Heat, Guilty, Heaven, Ovens

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.