Dreaming About Kissing

Most people who look this one up have already decided what it means, and the usual guess sits at the wrong end of the tradition. A kiss in a dream is read less often as desire than as agreement: the older collections treat it as a seal placed on something, a bond acknowledged, a quarrel closed, and occasionally as an act of insincerity when it came from somebody the dreamer does not trust. Attraction is in there, but as one reading among several rather than as the whole entry.

The identity of the other person

Interpreters go here immediately, and it is where the dictionary reading thins out fastest. Kissing a partner is measured against the state of things between you and treated as unremarkable. Kissing a friend, a colleague or somebody you would never once consider is the version that alarms people, and the standard reading has nothing to do with hidden attraction: the other person is usually taken as standing for a quality you have been dealing with in them, closeness being the crude way a dream says you have taken something on board. Kissing a stranger whose face never resolves is understood as something new rather than as somebody new.

When it goes wrong in the dream

A kiss that is refused, interrupted, or somehow impossible to complete belongs with the frustration dreams rather than the romantic ones. So does the version where the other person is entirely unmoved. Readers treat these as pictures of connection attempted and not landing, which can be about a friendship or a job as easily as a romance.

What you bring to the image

A kiss carries whatever it already carries for you, and that varies enormously between people, and between cultures where the gesture means greeting rather than intimacy. Somebody for whom it is an everyday hello is not dreaming what somebody who reserves it entirely is dreaming. Start from your own sense of the gesture, then see whether the tradition adds anything worth having.