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

Monsters are the stuff of which nightmares are made. But like just about everything in a dream, monsters are symbols.

For example, monsters are used to compare with people whose behavior and character are “monstrous.” A difficult situation can be a “real monster.”

“The monster within” means that something nasty lurks there. It can be a way of comparing to mental or physical illness. For example, cancer is compared to a monster. See: Cancer

Anything repressed, unwanted, or ignored in you can take form as something progressively nastier until acknowledged and healed. What’s depicted as a monster in a dream can be something about you trying to get your attention: a feeling, desire, perception, old wound, aspect of yourself. It can even be unused potential or the little voice calling you to deeper experience. Its characterization as a monster is based on your feelings and perceptions. It’s a projection from within you.

A monster can be a general symbol of something feared. The symbolism is revealed by your reaction. If you see a monster in your dream and flee in terror, it’s a clue that the monster symbolizes something you fear. If you confront the monster, it can mean you are confronting a fear. If you laugh in its face, it can symbolize freeing yourself from fear, or someone whose bark is worse than his bite. See: Fear

For example, a woman dreams recurrently about a huge monster hunting her. She never really sees it in detail, it’s just dark and scary. She flees at first sight of it and continues running long after the danger is past. Finally, sick of running, one night she turns on the monster and screams at the top of her lungs. The monster shrinks down to a little girl who looks timid and afraid. The woman continues yelling, exasperated, saying it’s mean to play such a trick on her and that good girls behave themselves.

She reflects on the dream and is struck by her statement about good girls behaving themselves. It’s something her mom used to say to her. Her mom used to criticize everything she did, and in response she’s a perfectionist. Her mom has been dead for twenty years but the woman is still an obsessive perfectionist, still afraid of being criticized, as if she’s still a little girl struggling to understand why, according to her mom, she can’t do anything right. The monster that chases her in her dreams is this unresolved part of her childhood that still deeply affects her.

A monster is something that can’t be controlled. In dreams, that can symbolize a situation or person that can’t be controlled. Something is getting out of hand. It’s a shit spiral.

On the other hand, “monster” can be used to describe something that can’t be stopped. It’s not necessarily bad. For example, if someone has a “monster game,” the person dominates, can’t be stopped. Some athletes and soldiers are referred to as beasts or monsters because they have wild strength and indomitable will, an association that opens avenues for dreams to use the symbolism.

A beast or monster can symbolize the animal side of human nature—not just the “animal in you,” but animal instincts, which can be perceived as beastly if unrestrained, untamed, or shunned.

Or it’s the “beast within,” your Mr. Hyde.

In that sense, a beast or monster can symbolize something about yourself that pops out only under certain circumstances, such as when you feel threatened or under duress.

A beast can symbolize a rejected or repressed side of you that takes a beastly form in dreams as a way of symbolizing your adversarial relationship with it. As with all dream characters, when a beast is in your dreams you look it in the eyes, and ask what you see about yourself or your life in it.

A destructive beast or monster in a dream can symbolize something causing destruction in you or your life: bad temper, financial loss or mismanagement, a failed marriage, addiction, neurosis, mental illness. It can mean that a behavior, instinct, thought, or feeling is unconscious and characterized as a monster only because it isn’t fully understood.

See also: Addicts, Animals, Anxiety, Cages, Cancer, Chasing, Creatures, Demons, Devils, Dragons, Drugs, Fear, Games, Ghosts, Insanity, Nightmares, Panic, Shadows, Spirits, Sports, Vampires, Werewolves, Witches, Zombies

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.