You wake with your heart going, sure for a few seconds that it really happened, then lie there feeling guilty for something you never did. Dreams of cheating on your partner are unsettling precisely because they seem to say something about who you are. Mostly, they don't say what they appear to.
This page is about dreams where you are the one who strays. For the more common fear, the partner who cheats on you, see dreams about your partner cheating.
| Variant | What the old books read | Source |
|---|---|---|
| You cheat on your partner | Committing adultery as being called to account | Miller 1901 |
| A lover comes to your house | A secret liaison | Yume handan jikkensho 1908 |
| An affair, running off together | Eloping as trouble arising from passion | Yume handan jikkensho 1908 |
| Cheating with a stranger | No such entry; embracing a stranger as an unwelcome guest | Miller 1901 |
| Getting caught | No entry in any book cited here | none |
| Resisting the temptation | Always good | Miller 1901 |
| Your partner cheats | Your lover eloping as his or her unfaithfulness | Miller 1901 |
What does it mean to dream about cheating on your partner?
The old dream books did not hesitate here. Miller's 1901 dream dictionary (Ten Thousand Dreams Interpreted) read dreaming that one commits adultery as being called to answer for some illegal action, and added a footnote that became one of the book's moral refrains: "It is always good to dream that you have successfully resisted any temptation. To yield, is bad." For Miller the dream was a test of character, passed or failed in the night.
The 1908 Japanese dream book by Karasawa Shōkaku, the Yume handan jikkensho, is shorter and just as blunt. In its chapter on human affairs it read a lover arriving at one's house as a sign of a secret liaison, almost the only line in the book that reads a dream exactly as seen. Lying with a woman it called, in a single word, ill-omened; a man and woman running off to marry elsewhere, trouble arising from passion.
The Meiji book also kept a stranger, older line. It read one's clothes suddenly tearing apart as adultery among wife, concubines and servants. That image comes straight from the Chinese Zhougong dream book (1880 print), which has the same scene in seven characters: clothes that suddenly tear mean a wife whose heart is elsewhere. The same Chinese list read lying with a woman as bringing an evil influence, and a door that opens by itself as a wife's secret affair. For these books, infidelity in a dream was rarely shown directly: it hid in torn cloth and doors swinging open. Miller worked the same way in places: lovers dreaming of embracing, he wrote, meant quarrels and disagreements arising from infidelity, unless the embrace took place under happy conditions, in which case the reverse.
What none of them did was treat the dream as a confession. They read character, household and fortune; the modern reading, below, reads feeling.
What you did
These are readings from the old dream books, reported as history; no dream is a forecast.
What does it mean to dream that you cheated on your partner?
It happens almost casually in the dream: a party, a colleague, a kiss that turns into more, and only afterwards the dread. Miller's 1901 dream dictionary read committing adultery as being called to account for some illegal action, and its entry on hugging read a married woman embracing others as endangering her honor. The 1908 Japanese dream book read a lover coming to the house as a secret liaison. Psychologists read the scene differently. When the dreamer is the one who takes what is not theirs, the reading shifts to desire: wanting something that has not been given, and the guilt of wanting it. The useful question is what the other person offered in the dream: attention, novelty, ease, being seen.
What does it mean to dream of having an affair?
Not one wild night but a whole secret life: meetings arranged, messages hidden, a second set of rooms. The 1908 Japanese dream book's nearest line is the eloping couple, read as trouble arising from passion. Miller's 1901 dream dictionary, under "Elopement", told the married that such a dream showed "you hold places which you are unworthy to fill". Psychologists hear the double life as a sign of divided time and energy: a job, a hobby, a friendship or a worry that is taking more of you than your relationship knows about. The affair is often a picture of where your attention has gone.
What does it mean to dream of cheating with a stranger?
The other person has no name and barely a face. No book cited here has an entry for it; Miller's 1901 dream dictionary read embracing a stranger as an unwelcome guest, and kissing illicitly as "dangerous past-times". In the Jungian reading, the stranger is the unmet self: qualities or impulses you have not yet recognized as your own. A faceless lover in a dream is often less about another person than about a part of you that wants room: more daring, more playful, less responsible for everyone else.
What does it mean to dream of cheating with someone you know?
A friend, a colleague, your partner's brother: the dream picks someone awkwardly close. No book cited here has an entry for it, and the old lines on lovers name no one in particular. Psychologists read the familiar lover the way they read any dream friend: the person carries qualities more than biography. What that colleague embodies, confidence, humour, calm under pressure, is often what the dream is really handling, and sometimes it is a quality you need from yourself rather than from them. Waking embarrassment around that person the next day is common, and it fades.
Being found out, and the other side
What does it mean to dream of getting caught cheating?
The door opens, the phone lights up, your partner's face. No dream book cited here describes being found out. The modern reading borrows from dreams of exposure: being seen without the usual coverings, role, composure, the version of yourself you present. Psychologists note that in such dreams the shame is mostly self-supplied. Being caught in a dream tends to follow days when you fear you have let someone down in some quite different way, a promise forgotten, a truth softened.
What does it mean to dream you almost cheated but stopped?
The moment comes and you step back, leave the room, say no. This is the one cheating dream the old books praised. Miller's 1901 dream dictionary called it "always good to dream that you have successfully resisted any temptation". Psychologists hear a boundary being tested and held, often at a time when something in waking life is pulling at you and you have already, quietly, decided.
What does it mean to dream your boyfriend or girlfriend cheated?
The roles reversed: they are the one who strays, and you watch. Miller's 1901 dream dictionary read a lover who elopes with someone else as his or her unfaithfulness, yet in the same book read a faithless sweetheart by contraries, as "a happy marriage". The 1908 Japanese dream book read a woman dreaming her husband had remarried as quarrels to come. Psychologists read these dreams as rehearsing a fear more than a fact. The full set of readings lives on dreams about your partner cheating.
What does a dream about cheating mean psychologically?
Psychologists are consistent and calm about sexual and romantic dreams: they are ordinary, near-universal, and rarely confessions. The dream partner usually carries a quality, closeness, aliveness, power, acceptance, rather than literal desire for that person. A dream of cheating adds one ingredient the others lack: the betrayal. That is why it lingers, and why the most useful reading usually starts with the guilt rather than the lover.
Two readings cover most of these dreams. In the first, the dream is about desire: wanting what has not been given, and the guilt of wanting it. The other person stands for something you miss, excitement, admiration, being looked at as new. In the second, the dream is about loyalty in a wider sense: time or care you feel you owe someone and are not giving, which the dream translates into the most vivid betrayal it knows.
Many people find these dreams arrive in stable, happy relationships, especially at transitions: moving in together, an engagement, a new baby, a long stretch apart. Something is shifting, and the dream tests the edges. If dreams like this regularly leave you distressed, that's worth mentioning to someone you trust. For the kiss that often starts the dream, see dreams about kissing; for the person from the past who often plays the lover, dreams about your ex.
A question to sit with
What did the other person in the dream give you that you have been missing, and could you find it somewhere you would not have to hide?
A dream book can tell you that Miller thought resisting temptation in a dream was always good, and that a Meiji author read torn clothes as a household's secret. It can't tell you why the dream came the week your partner went away, or why the stranger always looks like a younger you. That shows only when your dreams are recorded and kept together. Dreamlock, on the App Store for iPhone, is a private dream journal locked with Face ID: it listens to your dream, paints it, and reads it with the old books, the psychologists and one question. It never predicts anything.