Dreaming About Prison

Ask anybody about a prison dream and they will describe the door before they describe the cell. Whether it was locked, and whether they had actually tried it, is the detail the whole reading turns on: prison stands for constraint, and the tradition distinguishes sharply between a limit imposed from outside and one the dreamer has simply stopped testing. The second is both the more commonly reported and the more interesting of the two.

The self-built version

Interpreters have long read the unlocked cell as an obligation, a habit or an arrangement that could be left and is not being left. Jobs, routines and long-settled relationships all sit behind this image, and the people who describe it often mention a sense of the way out being available and unappealing at the same moment. That ambivalence is treated as the content of the dream rather than as a failure to notice the exit.

What changes the reading

Being put in a cell after some unexplained process belongs with the anxiety dreams about judgement. Visiting somebody rather than being held is understood as concern for a person you feel is stuck. Being released is one of the calmer versions and is generally connected to something in waking life having recently loosened. A cell with a window, which dreamers remember unusually clearly, is traditionally taken as constraint with a view of what lies beyond it, and readers treat that as the more hopeful arrangement.

Two things this entry will not do

It will not offer any comment on a legal matter, because a dream has nothing to contribute to one and this is not the place for that sort of guidance. And it will not pretend the image reads identically for everybody. Anyone who has been inside, or who has visited someone regularly, arrives at this picture carrying associations that no general entry can substitute for, and for them the dream is usually about memory rather than metaphor.