Father

In the interpretation of dreams, Father is among the recurring images that traditional dream-books and modern depth psychology have alike tried to read. It is commonly interpreted as authority, structure, protection, guidance, and order.

Common readings

The father figure is read as an image of authority and structure, of protection and guidance, and as one of the primary archetypal figures of the psyche.

The reading of dream symbols has a long documented history, from the Oneirocritica of Artemidorus in the second century to Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and the archetypal psychology of C. G. Jung. Such meanings are interpretive conventions of those traditions, offered here as ways the image has been understood rather than as fixed or established fact; in practice a symbol takes much of its sense from the individual dreamer and the setting of the dream.

What changes the reading

The father's bearing in the dream sets the reading: approving, absent, stern, diminished, dead or alive again. Dreams of a dead father returned belong to the visitation pattern and are often strikingly matter of fact, the conversation itself being the point. Interpreters separate the personal father from fatherhood as such, asking whether the dream concerns the man himself or authority, protection, judgment and permission wherever they now operate in the dreamer's life, an employer, a mentor, an institution, or the dreamer's own conduct toward dependants.

The Interpretation of Dreams is a book written in mourning. Freud began it in the years after his father's death in 1896, called that loss the most significant event of a man's life in the preface he added later, and salted the book with his own father dreams, among them the dream of the sign reading you are requested to close the eyes, dreamt around the funeral itself. The founding text of modern dream psychology is, among other things, one long father dream, and the school it founded read dream fathers with corresponding weight: authority, law, the figure before whom one is measured, and the ambivalence the theory insisted every son and daughter carries.

Jung, whose own father was a pastor whose faith had gone hollow, wrote an early essay on the significance of the father in the destiny of the individual, and his tradition widened the figure past the personal parent: the father archetype gathers the images of order, structure, blessing and prohibition, the king, the judge, the god who is called Father in half the world's prayers. The sun and sky carried the same office in the older symbolisms, as the mother carried earth and sea.

The working readings follow the split inherited on the mother's side: the dream father as the man himself, read through the dreamer's actual history with him, or as authority and protection as such, wherever those now sit, an employer, an institution, a conscience. Visitation dreams of dead fathers, common and often strikingly calm, the traditions mostly agree to leave uninterpreted, as doing their own work.