Dreaming About Money

Few symbols contradict themselves as openly as this one. Older dream books treat finding money as good fortune while warning in the same breath that money in dreams reverses itself, so that gaining stands for loss and losing for relief. What survives the muddle is a sense that money in a dream is rarely about currency at all. Readers use it as a measure of worth, of energy, and of what somebody believes they have available to spend.

Counting, finding, giving

Counting is the version most often reported and generally points to taking stock, checking whether resources of some kind will stretch. Finding notes or coins on the ground has long been connected with noticing something valuable that had gone unnoticed, which might be a skill, a friendship or an hour in the day. Handing money over suggests investment in another person. Being handed it reads, in older sources, as recognition, though several traditions add a note of obligation to the gift.

When the money is wrong

Notes that crumble, coins the wrong size, currency belonging to no country: these are common reports and usually indicate doubt about the value of something the dreamer has been offered or has already agreed to. Counterfeit money carries the strongest form of that, being tied to a suspicion of pretence, whether in a situation or in oneself.

Keep this well away from your accounts

No dream forecasts a payment, a bill or a windfall, and nothing in this tradition should be used to decide anything financial. What the tradition describes is a feeling about sufficiency, never an amount. Where a money dream repeats during a stretch of real financial strain, the plain explanation is the strong one, because worry follows people into sleep.

It matters enormously, too, what money meant in the house you grew up in. A dreamer raised watching every coin does not experience a fistful of notes the way somebody who never had to think about it does. That difference outweighs anything a symbol dictionary has to offer.