Here is the strange thing about cat dreams: the dreamer usually loves the cat, and Miller and the Golden Wheel almost never did. Those books filed the cat under cunning and false friends, while the person waking from the dream remembers warmth on the blanket and wants to know why it felt so good. Both readings are real. The gap between them is where this symbol gets interesting.
| Variant | What the old books read | Source |
|---|---|---|
| A cat attacking you | Enemies blackening the dreamer's reputation; banished, a rise in fortune | Miller 1901 |
| A cat scratching you | An enemy taking a deal's profits; care and trouble | Miller 1901; Golden Wheel 1862 |
| A cat meowing | A false friend working against the dreamer | Miller 1901 |
| Holding or petting a cat | Treachery by others; caressing cats, false friends | Miller 1901; Golden Wheel 1862 |
| A white cat | Harmless-looking entanglements, then sorrow and loss | Miller 1901 |
| A kitten | Small troubles and vexations | Miller 1901 |
| Killing a cat | Triumph over enemies | Golden Wheel 1862; Miller 1901 |
What does it mean to dream about a cat?
Miller's 1901 dream dictionary (Ten Thousand Dreams Interpreted) opened his entry bluntly: a cat "denotes ill luck, if you do not succeed in killing it or driving it from your sight." Almost every branch that follows reads enemies, false friends or treachery, and the only good ending is the dreamer's victory over the cat. The Golden Wheel Dream-Book (1862) was shorter and no warmer: "To see cats is hidden enmity", and cats in general a sign of loss through thieves.
Artemidorus, whose Oneirocritica (2nd century) we cite in Friedrich Krauss's 1881 German translation, gave the tomcat a single sentence, and a pointed one: it stood for an adulterer, because the cat steals birds, and birds, he had said earlier, are compared with women.
So the three books agree more than usual. Miller even denied the white cat its good name, and none of them grades a cat as black. The black-cat superstition belongs to waking folklore, not to these dream books.
What the cat did
These are readings from the old dream books, reported as history — no dream foretells the future.
What does it mean to dream of a cat attacking you?
A cat that leaps at your face or clings to your arm is a shock precisely because cats seem self-contained. Miller's 1901 dream dictionary read a cat attacking the dreamer as enemies ready to go to any extreme to blacken their reputation and take their property, but if the dreamer banished the cat, he read it as great obstacles overcome and a rise in fortune and fame. The modern reading hears a sharp edge in a relationship that is usually warm.
Was your dream different? Dreamlock reads the one you actually had →
What if the cat scratched or ignored you?
Two different dreams, and the quieter one often cuts deeper. Miller's 1901 dream dictionary read a cat's scratch as an enemy wrenching away the profits of a deal the dreamer had worked on for days; the Golden Wheel Dream-Book (1862) read being scratched as care and trouble. Being ignored is the psychological reading's home ground: closeness withheld, attention you can't summon.
What if you heard a cat meowing?
Sometimes the cat is only heard, crying behind a door. Miller's 1901 dream dictionary read the scream or mewing of a cat as a false friend using every word and every piece of work at their command against the dreamer. Psychologists hear a need, the dreamer's or someone else's, that keeps calling and hasn't been let in.
What if the cat was affectionate?
A cat on your lap, purring, kneading the blanket. Miller's 1901 dream dictionary didn't trust it: he read a young woman holding a cat or kitten as being drawn into impropriety through others' treachery, and the Golden Wheel Dream-Book (1862) read caressing cats as false friends. The modern reading is gentler: affection freely offered by a creature that didn't have to offer it. If the dream felt like rest rather than seduction, it probably was.
What colour and age it was
What does it mean to dream of a black cat?
The black cat is the one people most expect to carry a verdict, and the old dream books cited here give it none: Miller, the Golden Wheel and Artemidorus don't grade cats as black. The bad-luck idea comes from waking superstition. Psychologists hear the unlit side of a situation or a person, or the dreamer's own independence, cast as a little ominous.
Was your dream different? Dreamlock reads the one you actually had →
What does it mean to dream of a white cat?
A white cat looks like the lucky version, and Miller refused it that reputation. His 1901 dream dictionary read "a clean white cat" as entanglements that seemed harmless but would prove a source of sorrow and loss of wealth; a fat white kitten, for a woman, meant artful deception her good sense would finally ward off. Modern readers hear innocence that may not be quite what it seems.
What if it was a kitten?
Kittens should be the gentlest entry, and in Miller they weren't. His 1901 dream dictionary read kittens as "abominable small troubles and vexations" that would pursue the dreamer and cause loss, unless the kitten was killed. The modern reading hears something newly begun that needs looking after, and, like a dream of a baby, it isn't always a literal creature.
Was your dream different? Dreamlock reads the one you actually had →
What you did, and what happened to it
What does it mean to dream of killing a cat?
Killing a cat is unsettling to dream, and in these books it is the happy ending. The Golden Wheel Dream-Book (1862) read it as triumph over one's enemies, the one good branch of its entry. Miller's 1901 dream dictionary made killing or banishing the cat the escape from all its ill luck. Psychologists usually hear a boundary finally drawn, often with more guilt than triumph.
What does it mean to dream of a dead cat?
A cat lying still in the road or on the floor. Miller, the Golden Wheel and Artemidorus don't read a dead cat. The modern reading depends on whose cat it was: a pet from childhood often brings grief or a period of life ending; a stranger's cat, an independence or a closeness that has gone quiet.
What does a cat dream mean psychologically?
The modern reading rescues the cat from the old books' distrust without quite contradicting them. Psychologists tend to hear the cat as independence and affection on its own terms: cat dreams cluster around relationships where closeness can't be commanded, including the dreamer's relationship with their own needs. In the Jungian line the cat carries instinct that won't be trained.
The old books read the cat's self-possession as insincerity; the modern ear hears the same self-possession as honesty of a rarer kind. Where a dream of being chased is about what pursues you, the cat dream is usually about what won't.
A question to sit with
Where in your waking life are you waiting for affection that only arrives on someone else's terms, and is that someone else, or is it you?
Miller distrusted every cat; your dream cat may have been the warmest thing in the room. The difference is personal, and it shows most clearly across many dreams: the windowsill it sat on, the friendship that had just cooled. Dreamlock, on the App Store for iPhone, is built to hold that: it listens to the dream you record, paints it, and keeps your own symbol index as it grows.