Dreaming About Your Mother

The plot fades and the atmosphere stays. How this figure stands for care received and care given, and why no symbol in the dictionary depends more on the individual.

People who dream of their mother rarely remember much of the plot. What stays is the atmosphere: warmth, tension, relief, the odd sensation of being a child in that room again. Interpreters take this figure as a picture of the dreamer's whole relationship with care, both the care received long ago and the care they hand out now, rather than as a message from or about the actual person.

A mother living, and a mother who has died

This distinction alters the reading more than anything else does. Where she is alive, the dream is usually understood in terms of the current relationship, its comforts and its frictions. Where she has died, the dream is enormously common in bereavement, and many people describe it as the most comforting part of grieving. Researchers who study grief record such dreams frequently and regard them as an ordinary feature of mourning. No claim is made here about what they are, in either direction, but the comfort people take from them is real and deserves respect.

Angry, absent or unrecognisable

An angry mother. Long connected to the dreamer's own self-criticism, in the voice it was first learnt in.
A mother who does not recognise you. Frequently reported during a stretch of independence or distance.
A mother far younger than she ever was. Associated with seeing her as a person rather than a role.
Caring for her when she has never needed it. Taken as a shift in where responsibility sits.

No two dreamers hold this image alike

Nothing else in this dictionary rests so heavily on the individual. For one dreamer the figure is safety itself; for another she is the source of a difficulty that has taken years of work; for a third, adopted, estranged or bereaved early, the image may be assembled from somebody else altogether. Any general reading has to give way to what this person, in this life, genuinely means to the dreamer.

One last caution. A dream about a mother says nothing about her health or her circumstances, and it should never be treated as news about her.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why do I dream about my mother when we are not in touch?

Distance in waking life does not remove a figure from the dreaming mind, and readers often find that estrangement produces more of these dreams rather than fewer. The image tends to carry the unresolved parts of a relationship, which is precisely what silence leaves in place.

Is dreaming of a mother who has died a sign of something?

It is a very ordinary feature of grief, reported by an enormous number of bereaved people and often for years afterwards. What anyone takes from it is a personal matter, but no part of the dream tradition treats it as information about the future.