Key

In the interpretation of dreams, Key is among the recurring images that traditional dream-books and modern depth psychology have alike tried to read. It is commonly interpreted as solutions, access, secrets, and the unlocking of potential.

Common readings

A key is commonly read as the answer to a problem, access to something shut away, or the unlocking of a hidden capacity.

Cross-Cultural and Historical Readings

Freud's reading of keys and locks as sexual symbols, keys standing for the male and locks the female, is offered in his own text as one of a larger catalogue of such correspondences he considered nearly universal, a confidence later psychoanalytic writers have not uniformly shared. Keys carry unrelated symbolic weight in waking religious tradition: Matthew's image of Peter receiving "the keys of the kingdom of heaven" gave Western Christian art and papal iconography a durable emblem of authority to bind and loose, still visible in the crossed-keys symbol associated with the papacy. In Greek religion the goddess Hecate was frequently invoked as keeper of keys to the underworld and to crossroads, material dream dictionaries draw on without naming the source.

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.

The key is the smallest object that confers power, which is why it has always been ceremonial as much as practical: keys of the city surrendered to conquerors, the keys of the kingdom in the Gospel, the housekeeper's ring as the badge of trust. Iconography made the key an attribute, Saint Peter at the gate, Janus with his key to the year, Hecate holding keys to the underworld roads, and the folk dictionaries read dream keys along the same lines, finding one toward access and advancement, losing one toward opportunity slipped.

The fairy tales added the forbidden key. Bluebeard's wife receives every key of the house and one prohibition, and the small key to the forbidden chamber, stained with blood that will not wash away, made the key the emblem of the knowledge that cannot be un-known. A dream key that opens what should have stayed shut borrows that story's charge directly.

Freud's school read lock and key as one of its standard paired symbols, bluntly sexual in the theory, and recorded here as that tradition's reading. The gentler modern composite reads the key by its fit: the solution that answers a particular problem, the access one person alone holds, the potential waiting on the right instrument. Which door, and whether the dreamer turns the key or only carries it, are the details every school asks after first.