Road

In the interpretation of dreams, Road is among the recurring images that traditional dream-books and modern depth psychology have alike tried to read. It is commonly interpreted as one's life path, its choices, and where it leads.

Common readings

The road is a natural image of the life-course; forks, crossroads and the state of the way ahead are read as the choices and conditions of the journey.

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 cognitive linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, in Metaphors We Live By (1980), document "life is a journey" as one of the most pervasive conceptual metaphors structuring everyday English, embedded in phrases like a crossroads in life or a dead-end job well outside any dream-interpretation context; a dreamed road inherits this same ordinary linguistic metaphor rather than requiring a separate, dream-specific symbolic key. Artemidorus, for his part, reads journeys among the most consequential of all dream contents in the Oneirocritica, but insists the specific road, straight or winding, familiar or strange, must be weighed against the dreamer's actual planned travels and circumstances rather than assigned one fixed sense.

The road is one of the oldest figures for a life there is. Scripture speaks of ways straight and crooked, broad and narrow; the Tao is literally the Way; pilgrimage made the road a discipline, and the language has never let the metaphor go, so that a dreamer on a dream road is walking inside an idiom their waking tongue already speaks. Interpreters inherit the built symbolism whole: the fork as decision, the crossroads as fate's junction, the long straight road as the foreseeable, the road out of sight as the not yet known.

The crossroads carries its own freight, having been a place of omen, offering and uncanny meeting in European and African diasporic folklore alike, where what is buried or bargained at the crossing of ways binds the traveller. A dream that sets the dreamer at a crossroads borrows that charge whether or not the dreamer knows the lore.

Freud's contribution is characteristically stark: in the symbolism of dreams he read departure and setting out on a journey as one of the standing images of dying, the leave taking that stands for the last one. His school applied it with care to dreams of missed trains, which he read as consolation, the dreamer reassured they will not depart. These are the readings of their traditions; the plainer modern reading, the road as the life underway, its surface and weather as the going, remains the commonest and needs no theory at all.