Dreaming About a Road

Roads appear in dream reports more often than almost any other landscape, which is hardly surprising given how much of waking life is spent on them. The traditional reading stays close to the obvious one: a road stands for the direction a life is taking. What interpreters have always attended to is the condition rather than the road, since the useful material sits in the surface, the light and the turnings and not in the mere fact of a road being there.

What the surface is doing

• Straight and open. Read as clarity of purpose, and mentioned most in accounts of uncomplicated periods.
• Winding or badly lit. Associated with progress that cannot be seen very far ahead.
• Dug up or blocked. Taken as delay rather than as refusal.
• Narrowing until it disappears. Usually discussed as a plan that has run out of instructions.
• A fork. The oldest reading of the lot, and the one people reach for first.

A road you already know

Familiar routes carry their own freight. The walk to a primary school, the drive to a former workplace, the road out of a town somebody left years ago: these turn up with the emotional colour of the period still attached, and interpreters generally read the era rather than the tarmac. Dreamers frequently report the correct road with the wrong buildings along it, which is normal and not a sign of anything.

On foot, driving, or in the passenger seat

How much control the sleeper had is the detail worth keeping. Walking, driving and being driven are read as three degrees of say in the matter. A long-distance driver, a person who walks everywhere and somebody still shaken by a crash each meet the same stretch of road on quite different terms, which is why the dreamer sets the meaning and the dictionary follows along behind.