Ghost

In the interpretation of dreams, Ghost is among the recurring images that traditional dream-books and modern depth psychology have alike tried to read. It is commonly interpreted as the past, unresolved matters, memory, and what haunts the mind.

Common readings

A ghost is generally read as the return of the past, an unresolved matter, a memory or a regret that continues to haunt the dreamer.

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.

Dreams of the dead are documented across many unrelated cultures as a recognised category of experience, treated in some traditions, including strands of Talmudic dream literature, as genuine visitations rather than as symbolic content to be decoded, a distinction worth holding onto: not every tradition that takes a ghost dream seriously reads it symbolically at all. Jung, by contrast, reads a dreamed ghost or dead figure as an image arising from the personal or collective unconscious, tied to unresolved grief or to material the dreamer has not yet integrated, a specifically twentieth-century psychological framework distinct from the older traditions that treat such dreams as literal contact with the deceased.

The oldest ghost dream in European literature is in the Iliad. The night after Patroclus dies, his shade comes to the sleeping Achilles, exact in likeness down to the voice and eyes, and asks for one thing: burial, quickly, so that he may pass the gates of Hades where the other shades now bar his way. Achilles reaches for him and closes on smoke. The scene fixed the pattern the traditions kept for millennia, the dead returning in sleep not to terrify but to require something, rites owed, wrongs unsettled, remembrance kept.

The pattern is not only literary. Roman and Chinese practice alike took dream visits from the dead as claims, ancestors requiring offerings, the unburied requiring graves, and the medieval church catalogued dreams of souls asking prayers. The obligation reading, the ghost as unfinished business in the most literal sense, is among the most widespread dream conventions on record.

Modern bereavement research renamed the experience without dissolving it: visitation dreams, in which the dead appear alive, well and usually at peace, are common in grief, characteristically vivid, and are reported by the bereaved as consoling rather than frightening. The psychological traditions read the haunting kind of ghost dream toward the past that has not been laid, memory or guilt still walking; the visitation kind they mostly leave to do its evident work. Both readings are the traditions' own, and Homer, on the evidence, already knew both.