Dreaming about a soldier
For most dreamers a soldier is a costume: a figure carrying authority and threat with no personal experience behind it. For people who have served or lived through conflict it is not, and those reports belong with the trauma material rather than here.
Also searched as: soldiers, an army, someone in uniform, troops, being conscripted
Uniform and anonymity are the reported features. Dreamers describe soldiers as a group and are rarely able to describe an individual, which puts these reports near the crowd material.
Being conscripted, or being told to report somewhere, is a distinct and frequently reported version and is structurally an obligation dream: an instruction the dreamer did not agree to and cannot refuse.
Searches and checkpoints appear and belong with the border entry.
For veterans, and for people who have lived through war, these dreams are a different matter entirely. Recurrent combat dreams are a recognised feature of post-traumatic stress and the treatment literature is the relevant one, not this page.
Common associations
- Anonymity and uniform, in the general case.
- An obligation not agreed to, in the conscription reports.
- Authority without a face.
- Real experience, which changes everything.
Positive readings
Little. The useful content is the separation: knowing which of the two dreams you are having decides what to do about it.
Difficult readings
Where there is real experience of conflict or service, recurrent distressing dreams are a recognised symptom and there is effective treatment for them. Imagery rehearsal and related approaches have real evidence behind them, and that is a matter for a clinician rather than for a dream journal.
This entry says that plainly rather than offering an interpretation.
Psychological perspectives
For dreamers without experience, the figure is culturally supplied and behaves like every other faceless authority in this database: uniform removes individuality, and the response is to the role rather than the person.
The conscription structure is an obligation dream and belongs with the examination and late material.
For those with experience, the continuity is direct and the trauma literature applies. Those two things are not versions of each other and the entry does not treat them as such.
Cultural and historical
War appears throughout interpretive traditions and is usually read as conflict of some other kind, which is a reading that would be insulting to somebody dreaming about a war they were in.
The database records the tradition and states clearly which reports it does not apply to.
What the sleep science says
Well documented: recurrent post-traumatic nightmares as a recognised symptom, and the evidence for imagery rehearsal and related treatments.
Reasonably supported: uniformed and anonymous figures behaving as roles rather than persons in dream content.
Not established: any meaning for a soldier in the absence of real experience.
Your own context
- Have you served, or lived through conflict?
- Could you describe any individual?
- Were you being told to do something?
- Is this recurring and distressing?
If this recurs
If you have real experience behind these and they recur and distress you, that is worth taking to a clinician. There is treatment with evidence behind it and this site is not it.
Otherwise log with the obligation dreams.
Emotions often reported
- dread
- helplessness
- urgency
- detachment
- alarm
- fear
Specific a soldier 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.
- Do I have real experience of this?
- Could I see anyone individually?
- Was I being ordered somewhere?
Dream interpretation is subjective. Nothing here is a diagnosis, a prediction, or medical advice.
Sources and reviewed references
4 references. What these labels mean
- 1.Clinical Management of Chronic Nightmares: Imagery Rehearsal TherapySleep medicine
Barry Krakow and Antonio Zadra (2006) · Behavioral Sleep Medicine
Cited for: That rehearsing a rewritten version of a recurring nightmare while awake reduces nightmare frequency and distress.
- 2.Nightmares: A New Neurocognitive ModelPeer-reviewed research
Tore Nielsen and Ross Levin (2007) · Sleep Medicine Reviews
Cited for: A model of nightmare production combining affect load and affect distress, and the distinction between bad dreams and nightmares proper.
- 3.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.
- 4.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 a soldier 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
- PlaceA borderBorder dreams are document dreams, and they run into the finding that makes them almost inevitable: a passport is a piece of text with a photograph in it, and dreams can render neither.
- PersonPolicePolice in dreams are reported almost entirely in one role: the discovery of something the dreamer has done. Whether they have actually done anything is beside the point, and usually the dream does not say.
- PersonCrowdA crowd in a dream is not a lot of individuals. Dreamers consistently report being unable to say who was there, and that vagueness is the most informative thing about these reports.
- EventWarWar dreams in people with no combat experience track news exposure closely. In veterans and those who have lived through conflict they are frequently trauma-related and need different handling.
- PersonA colleagueThe purest demonstration of the availability finding in the database. People report dreaming about colleagues they barely think about, and are troubled by it, and the explanation is simply that they see them constantly.
- PersonA twin or doubleTwo of somebody is reported, accepted at the time, and found strange only on waking. It is distinct from the doppelganger, which is specifically seeing yourself, and it produces nothing like the same unease.
If you have this one often
A dream that frightens you and keeps coming back is its own subject. The nightmares section covers what is known about why they recur, the one rewriting technique with real evidence behind it, and when a nightmare stops being a dream problem and becomes something a clinician should hear about.
Records that mention a soldier
These pages link to a soldier, 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.