Wedding

In the interpretation of dreams, Wedding is among the recurring images that traditional dream-books and modern depth psychology have alike tried to read. It is commonly interpreted as union, commitment, the integration of opposites, or a new bond.

Common readings

A wedding is read as a joining, of two people, or, in the inner reading, of opposite sides of the self brought together, an image Jung called the coniunctio.

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

Interpreters ask whose wedding it is and how it feels. Marrying a stranger, marrying the wrong person, arriving late or watching another's ceremony are read as different dreams, and dread at the altar is not smoothed over into celebration. For the engaged, wedding dreams are usually taken first as ordinary rehearsal anxiety, well documented before large occasions of every kind, and only afterward as symbol. When no marriage is in prospect, the readings lean on what is being joined, two undertakings, two loyalties or two sides of the dreamer.

Folk tradition yoked weddings and funerals together long ago. The dictionaries and the proverb lore read the two by contraries in both directions, a dream wedding foretelling a death, a dream funeral a marriage, and the pairing was not arbitrary: both ceremonies take a person out of one state and deliver them into another, dressed and processed and witnessed, and the old Greek handbooks had already read marriage and death as images of one another on exactly that ground. The reading is a tradition's, not a fact, but it is one of the most persistent in the whole folk literature.

The psychological traditions kept the structure and dropped the omen. A wedding joins two parties into one household; read inwardly, in the Jungian manner, the dream marriage becomes a union of opposites within the dreamer, a reading that school took over from alchemy, whose texts imaged the work's completion as a royal marriage. Freud's tradition attended instead to whose wedding the dream stages and what wish or fear the staging serves.

Beneath both, the modern research reading is plainer: for the betrothed, wedding dreams, including unhappy ones, are ordinary rehearsal anxiety before a large and public undertaking. The dream is doing what dreams demonstrably do with any approaching performance, and needs no symbolism until that layer is exhausted.