Moon

In the interpretation of dreams, Moon is among the recurring images that traditional dream-books and modern depth psychology have alike tried to read. It is commonly interpreted as intuition, the feminine, cycles, emotion, and the hidden.

Common readings

The moon is widely read as an image of intuition, of cyclical change and of the feeling and hidden life, set against the daylight clarity of the sun.

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 moon's phase and behaviour carry the reading. A full moon, a new moon, an eclipse and a moon that is wrong in some way, too large, too near, doubled, are treated as distinct images, and dreams of the moon reflected in water are noted for putting the emphasis on reflection itself. Because the moon governs no daylight, interpreters tend to read what happens under it as belonging to the inward and periodic side of life, and they ask what in the dreamer's waking world is waxing, waning or briefly darkened.

The moon's most famous dream appearance is in Genesis, where the young Joseph dreams that the sun, the moon and eleven stars bow down to him, and his father interprets on the spot, sun and moon as father and mother, the stars as brothers. The passage preserved, inside scripture itself, the old handbook method of reading the heavenly bodies as the great persons of the dreamer's life, and the Greek interpreters worked the same equivalence, the luminaries standing for parents and rulers, their brightening and darkening for those persons' fortunes.

Astrology systematised the correspondence: in the Hellenistic inheritance the moon governs the changeable side of life, tides, months, moods, the body's rhythms, and its monthly death and return made it everywhere the marker of cycle, waxing to fullness and waning to dark without ever being lost. The lunar calendars of Judaism, Islam and East Asia keep sacred time by it still.

The modern psychologies inherited a moon already saturated. The Jungian tradition reads it toward the anima, the feminine and the reflective, borrowed light against the sun's source light, and toward everything periodic in the psyche; popular dictionaries compress this to intuition, emotion and the hidden. These are readings within traditions, and the moon's phase in the dream, full, new, eclipsed or wrong, is the detail all of them ask for before venturing anything.