Dreaming about bones
Bones are reported without much fear, which is the surprising thing about them. Dreamers describe skeletons and skulls with curiosity or detachment far more often than with dread.
Also searched as: a skeleton, broken bones, bones in a dream, skull
The detachment is the consistent feature. A skeleton in a dream is rarely threatening, and people regularly report examining one.
Broken bones are a separate group and, as with every injury report in this database, pain is usually absent.
Bones found rather than encountered, buried or in a wall or under a floor, form a third and much more unsettling group, and those belong with the basement and hidden material.
Skulls appear in a small number of reports and are described as objects rather than as remains, which dreamers sometimes remark on.
Common associations
- Detachment, which is what the reports actually contain.
- Structure, in the readings that treat bones as what holds a thing up.
- What was buried, in the discovery reports.
- Absence of pain, in the injury ones.
Positive readings
Not much, though the absence of fear is itself worth getting down. A category of image that everybody expects to be frightening and reliably is not tells you something about how dreams assign emotion.
Difficult readings
The discovery version is genuinely unsettling and dreamers describe it as the worst kind of finding: something that was always there.
Broken bones produce alarm without pain, which dreamers frequently find stranger than pain would have been.
Psychological perspectives
The reliable absence of pain in dream injury is a real and slightly odd finding. Pain is reported in dreams occasionally but far less often than injury is, and this is one of the clearest places to see it.
The emotional flatness of skeleton reports suggests emotion is assigned by the dream rather than derived from the content, which is the same argument the police and forgetting entries make from other directions.
Continuity is weak here, since almost nobody encounters bones, so the imagery is largely cultural.
Cultural and historical
Bones and relics carry serious significance in a number of religious traditions, and the treatment of the dead varies enormously and is taken seriously nearly everywhere.
The skull as a memento mori is a specific European artistic tradition with a long history.
Ossuaries and secondary burial are real practices in several cultures and change what bones mean to a dreamer from those contexts entirely.
What the sleep science says
Reasonably supported: pain is reported far less frequently in dreams than injury, including in vivid injury reports.
Reasonably supported: dream emotion is assigned rather than derived from content.
Not established: any meaning for bones.
Your own context
- Were you frightened, and did that surprise you?
- Were they found or encountered?
- Was there any pain?
- Whose were they?
If this recurs
Log with whatever the bones were part of. A recurring buried find belongs with the basement and hidden material; a recurring skeleton is usually part of something else.
Emotions often reported
- detachment
- curiosity
- unease
- fascination
- dread
- melancholy
Specific bones dreams
Each of these is written separately, not generated from this page.
Questions for reflection
These are for your journal, not for us. Nothing you write is shared.
- Was I frightened at all?
- Did I find them or meet them?
- Was there pain?
Dream interpretation is subjective. Nothing here is a diagnosis, a prediction, or medical advice.
Sources and reviewed references
3 references. What these labels mean
- 1.The Scientific Study of Dreams: Neural Networks, Cognitive Development and Content AnalysisAcademic book
G. William Domhoff (2003) · American Psychological Association
Cited for: The continuity hypothesis (that dream content largely reflects waking concerns) and a sustained critique of symbolic dream interpretation as an evidential method.
- 2.The Content Analysis of DreamsAcademic book
Calvin Hall and Robert Van de Castle (1966) · Appleton-Century-Crofts
Cited for: The standard coding system for dream content, and the normative frequencies that later studies are compared against. The reason claims like "aggression is more common in dreams than friendliness" can be stated numerically at all.
- 3.The Reinterpretation of Dreams: An Evolutionary Hypothesis of the Function of DreamingPeer-reviewed research
Antti Revonsuo (2000) · Behavioral and Brain Sciences
Cited for: The threat-simulation hypothesis. That the over-representation of threatening content in dreams may be functional rather than incidental.
Dreamers’ accounts
How dreams of bones have gone for other people, in their own words. Nothing here is an interpretation of anyone else's dream. It is a record of what happened and what it was like.
Nothing here yet. Be the first to say how this has gone for you.
Related records
- PlaceBasementBasements produce a narrower and more consistent set of reports than any other room: descending, dark, a sense that something is down there, and a reluctance to go further. The consistency is real. The standard explanation for it is not established.
- EventFuneralA funeral in a dream does not predict a death. It is one of the most reliable images the mind has for an ending, and it appears far more often around change than around bereavement.
- ActionDyingThe folk belief that dying in a dream kills you is false, and it is the first thing this entry should say. People dream of their own deaths regularly, report it, and are here to report it.
- SymbolBloodBlood in dreams is reported far more often as vitality, kinship or alarm than as violence. The most useful question is whose it was, and whether anyone in the dream reacted.
- SymbolNailsNails behave in dreams exactly like teeth and hair: they come away, they grow wrongly, and they multiply. All three are keratin, all three are reported the same way, and that pattern is more interesting than any of them alone.
- SymbolGunThe most reported gun dream is one where the gun does not work. Trigger pulls that produce nothing, bullets with no force, and aim that will not hold are described far more often than any shot.
Records that mention bones
These pages link to bones, either as something reported in the same dream or as a related subject. This page does not point back at all of them, so the list is assembled rather than chosen.