Dreaming About Escaping

The part of an escape dream worth writing down first is the mood you woke in, because it varies more than the plot does. Getting out of something has always been taken two ways: as a move towards freedom, and as a way of not facing what was left behind. The tradition never settled that argument, which is useful rather than unhelpful, since identical images can carry either sense.

Getting out and getting away with it

Escaping a building, a room or a country is understood as distance from a situation. Escaping pursuit or custody belongs to a slightly different family and shades towards consequence, towards something the dreamer feels is catching up rather than merely hemming them in. Succeeding and nearly succeeding carry different weights in the older collections; the near miss is treated as the more revealing of the two, since it holds the wish and the doubt in one picture.

What tends to come before it

Many who report these dreams describe a stretch of postponement beforehand: a conversation left unhad, a job worked out through a long notice period, an arrangement that stopped fitting some time ago. That is a pattern in reports, not a rule, and it will not apply to everybody. It earns a mention because it gives the dream an ordinary explanation that sits comfortably beside the symbolic one.

What you were escaping from

General readings run out quickly here, because the thing fled is nearly always personal. Somebody escaping a crowded party is not having the dream that somebody escaping a flood is having, even though a dictionary files both under one heading. Your own answer to what you were getting away from will do more work than this entry can, and if the answer is that you were late for something, that is an answer too.