Dreaming About Running

The complaint is close to universal: you are running and getting nowhere, the legs are heavy, the ground has turned to treacle. A good deal of that has a plain cause. During REM sleep the body switches off most voluntary muscle movement, so a sleeping mind issues the instruction to run and receives no confirmation that any running is under way, and the mismatch gets rendered as effort without progress. The traditional reading sits on top of that rather than replacing it: running is read as urgency, and interpreters weigh which way the urgency points.

Away from, or towards

Running from something overlaps heavily with the chase dream and is usually discussed alongside it, with the older books connecting it to avoidance during daylight hours. Running towards something is treated quite differently: a train about to leave, a person on a platform, a building that keeps receding. That version is read as wanting rather than fearing, and those who report it tend to describe the frustration as the whole of the dream. Running with nothing involved at all, for the pleasure of it, is generally read as capability, and it is one of the few dreams in this section people are sorry to wake from.

The heaviness has a plain cause

Beyond the muscle atonia, bedding wrapped round the legs, an awkward sleeping position and a long walk the previous day all surface as dreamed heaviness. This is worth saying clearly, because the sensation unnerves some people. It is not treated as a sign of anything wrong with a body, and it is far too widespread to be read as one.

Who is doing the running

For a habitual runner the dream may be little more than a body rehearsing something it enjoys. For somebody who has had to run in earnest, from violence, from a disaster, from a place they had to leave behind, the identical footage carries weight that no general reading should try to flatten. Begin with what running has meant across your own life and let the tradition come second.