What Does Your Childhood Dream Mean?

A girl sleeps in a train carriage, illustrating the concept of childhood dreams.

Listeners frequently submit dreams they remember from childhood for interpretation.  These dreams present a unique challenge for analysts as they tend to lack the conscious context and associations of adult dreams. Yet Jung considered childhood dreams to be extraordinarily important, as they are filled with archetypal imagery rising from the collective unconscious.  

Many of us can vividly recall childhood dreams decades later because, as Jung wrote,

“If things made a deep impression on us in childhood, we may assume that something highly important lies within what impressed us as such . . . something which is meaningful for the whole later course of life.” 

Returning to our childhood dreams as adults can:

  • Give us insight into pain that needs attending to,
  • Connect us to the numinous
  • Provide us with guidance as we strive for individuation.

We had many dreams submitted for our episode on Childhood Dreams (watch the episode here): below is a summary of the dream analysis that made up the episode.

Jung’s Childhood Dream: An Early Initiation

A velvet red and golden throne from a childhood dream of Carl Jung.

Jung himself had experience with a dream in childhood continuing to exert its influence on his psyche decades later. At about age three or four, Jung had a dream which remained with him all his life and is a perfect example of how children’s dreams contain eternal, archetypal material that can become clouded in the dreams of adults.

In his dream, Jung came across a chamber underneath the ground of a meadow near his home. Within the chamber he saw:

… a magnificent throne, a real king’s throne in a fairy tale. Something was standing on it, which I thought at first was a tree trunk, 12 to 15 feet high and about one and a half to two feet thick. It was a huge thing, reaching almost to the ceiling.

But it was of a curious composition. It was made of skin and naked flesh, and on top there was something like a rounded head with no face and no hair. On the very top of the head was a single eye gazing motionlessly upward. It was fairly light in the room, although there were no windows and no apparent sources of light. Above the head, however, was an aura of brightness.

The thing did not move, yet I had the feeling that it might at any moment crawl off the throne like a worm and creep toward me. I was paralyzed with terror. At that moment, I heard from outside and above me my mother’s voice. She called out, “Yes, just look at him. That is the man eater.”

Jung “awoke sweating and scared to death”, so frightened by the possibility of a similar dream that he was afraid to go to sleep for many nights after. Though the dream was terrifying, Jung found it to be a meaningful experience of initiation: “Through this dream I was initiated onto the secrets of the earth…It was an initiation into the realms of darkness. My intellectual life had its unconscious beginnings at that time.”

Jung later came to understand that the image in the dream was a ritual phallus, a figure which contains the spark of life, but is also monstrous and potentially lethal. Jung came from a long line of pastors and this dream depicts his first confrontation with all parts of God, including the fearsome aspects that have been rejected by mainstream religion. 

We can see how this dream created the foundation for Jung’s intellectual life, particularly his theory of the Self and the way all archetypes hold dark and light aspects.

Jung’s childhood dream planted the seeds of one of the most important questions he explored, that is, “Who spoke to me then? Who talked of problems far beyond my knowledge?”. That is the Self, and, as we can see from the submissions of our dreamers, it is with us from the beginning. 

Childhood Nightmares

A crocodile's eyes peek over the waterline, illustrating childhood nightmares.

Many listeners recalled childhood dreams contain frightening imagery. And just like the nightmares of adults, children’s nightmares contain vital messages from the Self about their inner and outer worlds. 

This dreamer (a 38-year-old woman) recalls the following dream occurring when she was four years old, during a time of major transition in her family. When the dreamer was two, her younger brother was born. A few months later, her parents sent her to live with her paternal grandparents because her mother was overwhelmed by caring for two young children. 

The dreamer lived with her grandparents for two years and had the dream shortly after moving back in with her parents:

I am walking in the dark, in my pajamas. It is so dark that I can’t see anything, but I know I’m in a swamp because the ground is wet and sloshy. The sky is also too dark to see but I know it is the belly of a boar. I walk very slowly and carefully and at one point I feel something hard and scaly under my foot. It is the back of a crocodile. With every step, I walk on another crocodile. It’s like a path made of crocodiles. Suddenly I hear a creak and I feel a void under my foot and a crocodile bites my leg off.

Unlike most reptiles, crocodiles nurture their young for months after birth, carrying their babies in their mouths and feeding them. However, they also remain aggressive predators with powerful jaws. A young child (like the dreamer) would not be able to defend herself if the crocodile decided to snap. The crocodile biting the dreamer’s leg off right when she’s finding her path could be symbolic of the loss and displacement she experienced when she was sent away to her grandparents.

The snapping crocodile and the encounter with the void could also point to the dreamer’s encounter with the shadow side of the family archetype — feeling very loved by her grandparents and her parents visiting her every night when she lived away from them; and at the same time experiencing a form of exile when her needs surpassed the outer limits of her parents’ energy. Perhaps the dreamer wondered if there would come a time where she would be sent away again.

Dive deeper into the world of your dreams with DREAM SCHOOL, our 12-month online program in Jungian dream interpretation, taught by Lisa Marchiano, Joseph Lee and Deborah Stewart.

Childhood dreams with animal imagery can be an early message from the Self about our relationship to our most primal instincts. Here the dreamer is surrounded by animals—from the boar above her to the crocodile path beneath her feet—and we might interpret this as pointing to a potential conflict with her own instincts, particularly aggression. 

The dreamer’s parents were usually happy, but her mother was at times verbally violent towards her father. Healthy aggression enables us to move forward and claim our own agency, but we may struggle to do so if we associate moving forward with our legs being bitten off! Part of the journey from childhood to adulthood is learning to navigate our most primal instincts—how do we relate to the snapping crocodile within us?

Encountering the Numinous

An old White House covered in vines in the darkness, illustrating childhood dreams.

Here we have two dreamers experiencing what Jung did when he came across the ritual phallus in his own childhood nightmare: ordinary scenarios interrupted by the appearance of something darkly numinous, something truly other, which the dreamers must face. Numinous dream images suggest encounters with the Self and Jung believed that the numinous is what ultimately heals.

The first dreamer is a 33-year-old woman who had the following dream at about age six. It was a recurring dream she stopping having by age seven:

I am going on a trip with my parents. We are getting ready to leave, heading out to the car. It is daytime. I think we are planning to go to my friend’s house. I look down and realize I am not wearing my shoes. I need to get my “Esmeralda sandals.” I don’t remember if I told my parents I forgot my sandals or just go to find them without saying anything, but either way I am scared, nervous to look for the sandals alone. I think I am concerned they will leave on the trip without me. When I go into our house, everything is so dark. All the blinds are drawn, and it is very hard to see. I see a glowing light in the distance, my Esmeralda sandals are glowing. There is another glowing from above me, from the loft that looks over the living room. I look up at it, and standing above me in the loft is a glowing blue cartoon man. He is not particularly scary looking, but he terrifies me, all he does is stand there staring. I leave in distress without my sandals.

(In waking life, the dreamer really did have a pair of special sandals decorated with a drawing of Esmeralda, the female lead in Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The dreamer also finds it significant that, as a mixed-race woman, she has a similar skin tone to Esmeralda).  

The Self is often represented in dreams by religious symbols and figures. The glowing blue skin of the cartoon man calls to mind the Hindu tradition of depicting deities and their avatars with bright blue skin. The dreamer’s glowing sandals also indicate we are in the realm of the transpersonal—in the Catholic tradition Jesus’s sandals were considered holy relics to be worshiped; many myths and fairy tales also contain shoes with special properties, such as Cinderella’s glass slipper and Hermes’s winged sandals in Greek mythology.

Life crisis and trauma can open us up to the numinous (in fairy tales, for instance, we often see help appearing in an unlikely form when all seems hopeless). This dreamer states she began having this dream during her parents’ divorce and, though the divorce was amicable, the dreamer writes that the split remains painful for her. 

The cartoon man watching from above could be a representation of the dreamer’s observing self, and although the dream figure frightened her, it may have been the consistent internal support she needed as the relationship between her parents unraveled. Even when the form the Self takes in dreams frightens us, it can help to remember that Self dreams catalyze healing.

The dreamer presents a heroic figure as she ventures into her dark house alone to retrieve her sandals and faces down a force which scares her (just as the character Esmeralda does throughout The Hunchback of Notre Dame). What can we make of the fact that the dreamer ends up leaving without her special shoes? Perhaps the loss of the shoes represents the necessary loss of innocence we all must experience as we gain consciousness about the reality of the world around us. 

The dreamer says she feels there may have been more to her parents’ split than they originally told her, but she has been afraid to ask her mother for more information. So this dream may represent an early realization of the risks that come with knowing.

three colored eggs in a wooden bowl depict a childhood dream about a golden egg.

The second dreamer in this series is a 49-year-old woman who had her numinous dream before age 10:

I was in my bedroom, doing somersaults on my bed. Suddenly a large golden egg landed in the middle of my bed. It felt as if it had somehow come from outer space. I went to touch it, but realized it was electrified, and that if I touched it, I would die. I knew I had to continue to do somersaults, but now I was terrified in case I accidentally touched the egg. 

The golden egg, a visual representation of wholeness, is a powerful Self symbol. It is beautiful, valuable, yet also terrifying to the dreamer and clearly otherworldly.

On an archetypal level, this dream is like a creation myth—many creation myths begin with the cosmic egg that cracks open so differentiation can occur (the separation of the earth and sky, for instance). It could be that something new has happened in the psyche of the dreamer and the beauty and danger of the egg reflects that. 

On one hand, the egg is beautiful and full of promise; on the other hand, the egg is hostile and could kill her. And all these qualities are contained in a single thing. Many childhood dreams can reflect this new differentiation, as Jung’s childhood dream did when he met the dark side of God.

We might also interpret the egg as a symbol of fate. It appears suddenly and the dreamer must maneuver around it. Sometimes in childhood we get a glimpse of our life’s purpose; we may not yet be ready for the intensity and demand of that purpose as a young child, but this nascent life from the divine mother is still there and waiting to hatch.

Meeting the Witch: Active Imagination

Cauldrons hung over a campfire illustrate the concept of childhood dreams.

If a dream image or figure from childhood continues to preoccupy us into adulthood, it is likely we still have something to learn from it. Jung discovered active imagination during a time when he was being overwhelmed by his unconscious, and he considered it one of the most important tools for healing. 

Active imagination contains so much healing potential because it allows us to retain ego awareness while being fully open to unconscious material; this enables us to interact with a dream image instead of being passive recipients of it, as we are when we sleep. In this way, we can continue the conversation with Self in waking life. To practice active imagination, Jung suggested focusing on an image and allowing it to move autonomously (easier said than done!).   

The following dreamer used active imagination to resolve a recurring childhood dream of a witch that had secretly haunted her for about 38 years:

I am walking in the backyard of my childhood home with my mom and dad. I am positioned in between them, each of my tiny hands clasped in one of theirs. We seem happy, smiling as we pass the old Maple tree that towers outside the kitchen window and head toward the orchard full of apple, plum and peach trees, when suddenly a trap door in the ground opens to reveal a tall, wrinkly old witch with long, black, stringy hair dressed in black robes and a pointed hat. She is stirring a large cauldron full of a thick, dark, bubbling liquid. The witch looks up and reaches for my leg. Her bony fingers grasp my ankle. I struggle to free myself, but my mom begins to push me down, saying, “Take her, take her.” My dad is trying to pull me toward him, shouting, “No, no.” Then, I wake up. 

(The dreamer is a 43-year-old woman who was around five when the dream first occurred)

She reported having a challenging relationship with her mother throughout her life. She says she and her older sister had all their physical needs met, but that her mom had a high-stress job as a social worker for child protective services and was often tense because money was tight. The dreamer’s mom was physically affectionate, but could be emotionally reactive and cold, something the dreamer struggled with as a sensitive young child. 

As the dreamer grew older her relationship with her mom became very hot and cold, even though she still longed for a closer relationship. The dreamer’s relationship with her mom hit a boiling point when she was 35 and gave birth to her daughter, going nine months without speaking to her mom (though eventually they did reconcile).

The dreamer used a blank document on her computer for the active imagination exercise, saying that she “turned inwards, and beckoned [the witch] to appear”, asking the witch what message she had to share about the dream and then transcribing the dialogue. 

The witch explained that the dreamer’s mother was not giving her to the witch as a sacrifice but instead was pushing the dreamer to find her own inner witch, something the dreamer’s mother knew she needed but could not give to the dreamer herself. If we have a difficult relationship with a parent, we may feel conflicted about traits we share with them and try to suppress those traits. The witch was there to show the dreamer that “darker” traits like ferocity and aggression are necessary to protect ourselves.   

The witch is a beautiful example of how the Self appears to us as medicine. We might wonder, as the dreamer did, why a particular dream had to be given to us, especially if that dream is terrifying. The witch shows us that these dreams are a kind of medicine—even when the medicine is bitter, it is in the service of our individuation. The witch said the dream had to be frightening “so that it would stay with you. It would keep gnawing at you until you went in to face the darkness.”.

This dreamer’s active imagination exercise shows how we can tune into the Self at any time, no matter how much time has passed since the initial dream appearance. As the witch told the dreamer, “It is in you. I am in you. If you ever need me, all you need to do is call on me and I’ll be there.”

Five More Childhood Dreams

A tornado swirls over a field in the rain, illustrating a childhood dream about a tornado warning.

Readers sent us hundreds of dreams, and sadly, we could not analyze them all. Here, we reprint five more childhood dreams that stood out to us for you to consider and reflect on. 

Quicksand

 I’m with my grandma on the grassy slope at the back of their house. Suddenly we both fall into a round hole in the ground, and we find ourselves in a pool of quicksand. We are slowly sinking into the sand. I know for sure that when the sand reaches the level of my heart, I will die. I look around in terror for ways to save us. I manage to grab a piece of grassy turf, and drag it down into the pit. We are able to climb out and escape. 

Tornado

This was a recurring dream for me as a child. I was in the upstairs of my home, and I noticed it was very dark outside even though it was daytime. I heard a tornado siren and knew a tornado was coming and that I had to get to the basement right away. As I started down the stairs, the air pressure in the house changed, everything became utterly silent, and gravity lightened so that I began to float down the staircase and I couldn’t hurry. I knew this meant the tornado was here. 

A Car is Driven Into the Sea

My mother is driving my older sister and I through our city. We come to the river. She turns off the road and drives the car off the edge so it falls into the water. My sister and I sit terrified in the back and I watch the murky water rise past the windows as we sink down into the depths. 

Befriending Monsters

I am separated from my mother, and I get onto a ride that takes me through a cave where monsters and goblins sneer at me and frighten me as I go along. Then I realize I can talk with them and by the end of the ride, the monsters have turned into sympathetic figures that listen to me as I talk. I then climb a ladder to get to where my mom is. I climb up to a room where I find my mom with the other adults. She cheerfully turns to me and says enthusiastically “Hi, do you want a donut?” I roll my eyes at her cheerfulness and seeming disregard for all I have just gone through. 

Star Boy

A boy comes down from space and is in my bedroom. Together we fly out of the window and around the neighbourhood. It’s night. I like being with him but then I feel worried because we are just out of the house at night. We go into the garage where the floor is painted red. He’s going to go away now. He can’t be with me anymore. It’s not safe for me to spend all my time with him

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