Dreaming About a Wedding

The first thing any reading of this dream wants to know is whose wedding it was, because the inherited meanings hardly overlap. Your own ceremony is conventionally interpreted as commitment, or as two parts of your life being joined together. Attending somebody else's is interpreted as witnessing a change you have no hand in. And the wedding that falls apart, which is far and away the most reported version, is treated as something different again.

When the ceremony goes wrong

No dress, no guests, the wrong venue, a partner who never turns up, nobody having told the caterers: people describe these scenes vastly more often than they describe a wedding that runs smoothly. The reading attached to them is not that a relationship is doomed. It sits alongside exam dreams and dreams of arriving too late, all of which are understood as performance under an audience, and the anxiety belongs to the dreamer rather than to anybody they love.

There is also a completely mundane explanation wherever it applies. Anybody planning a real wedding dreams about weddings in exhausting detail, over and over, and mostly about everything capable of going wrong. That is not symbolism. That is a checklist carrying on after the light goes off.

Union in the wider sense

Older interpreters applied this image well beyond romance. Two separate households becoming one was a useful picture for a business partnership, for a family repair after years of silence, or for somebody bringing two halves of their own character into the same room. Those broader readings survive precisely because the dream turns up so often in people with no romantic situation whatsoever.

Traditional material on this image also carries a quantity of period assumption about what marriage was supposed to mean for a man and for a woman. That part has been left where it was found.

What the word already means to you

Somebody who has sat through four receptions this summer dreams of weddings the way they dream of airports, as recent furniture. Somebody who has been waiting years for a proposal dreams of the identical room in an entirely different key. Sleep reaches for whatever the word was already carrying before it reaches for any general meaning.