Dreaming About a Wound

Everyday speech reached this image long before any dream book did. People talk about old wounds, about something being reopened, about a remark that cut, and the traditional interpretation of a wound in a dream runs along exactly that line: hurt which has not finished healing. It is understood as something the dreamer is carrying, and never as information about a body.

Fresh, old, or being tended

Age is the distinction these readings care about. A fresh, bleeding injury is interpreted as a hurt that is current and still being felt daily. An old wound splitting open again is interpreted as something the dreamer believed was finished, brought back by a situation that rhymes with the first one. A wound that is closing, or one being bandaged by somebody else, is usually taken as care being accepted, which a good many dreamers notice is the more difficult half of the picture.

What a dream cannot tell you

This needs saying flatly. A dream is not a diagnostic instrument. Dreaming of an injury does not indicate that anything is wrong with you or with anybody you love, and nobody should treat a dream as a reason to worry about their health, or as a reason to delay asking a professional about a real symptom. The traffic runs one way only: genuine pain or discomfort during the night has a well-documented habit of turning up as imagery, which is why people recovering from an injury often dream of one.

Place, and personal history

Location shifts the sense of the image for most dreamers. Hands are commonly tied to work and capability, the face to how somebody feels they are seen, the feet to independence. And anyone who has actually been badly hurt brings that memory into the room with them. For them the dream may be nothing more than memory doing its ordinary night-time work, and no symbolic reading should be allowed to talk over it.