You open a cupboard, lift a sheet, wade into a pond, and there it is. Corpse dreams have their own particular dread: not grief, usually, but the shock of finding something that shouldn't be there. The old dream books could not have disagreed more about them. One of them treated the corpse as nearly the worst thing a dreamer could see; another put embracing one among the best.
| Variant | What the old books read | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Seeing a corpse | Sorrowful tidings; talks that succeed | Miller 1901; Yume handan jikkensho 1908 |
| Embracing a corpse | Rank and riches | Yume handan jikkensho 1908 |
| A rotting corpse | A prospering family trade | Yume handan jikkensho 1908 |
| Finding a corpse | No finding entry; a corpse in its casket as trouble | Miller 1901 |
| Hiding a corpse | No entry in any book cited here | none |
| A stranger's corpse | No stranger entry; an abandoned corpse as being abandoned | Yume handan jikkensho 1908 |
| A corpse that moves | A guest arriving; standing up as very bad | Zhou Gong |
| Many silent dead | Long rains | Menglin xuanjie 1906 |
What does it mean to dream about a corpse?
Miller's 1901 dream dictionary (Ten Thousand Dreams Interpreted) is uncompromising: to dream of a corpse is "fatal to happiness", bringing "sorrowful tidings of the absent, and gloomy business prospects". His entry runs on through corpses in caskets, corpses dressed in black and a battlefield of the dead, all of it trouble. He even read the corpse of a member of one's own family as a death in the family, though he gave "a serious rupture of domestic relations" as the alternative. It is the kind of line that frightens people who look it up at three in the morning; it is also a century-old reading, and no dream has ever been shown to work that way.
The 1908 Japanese dream book, Karasawa Shōkaku's Yume handan jikkensho, reads the corpse almost entirely by contraries. Its section on the dead gives "死人を抱くとみれば官位進み財寶集まる": to embrace a dead body is rank rising and treasure gathering. Seeing a dead person it read as talks reaching agreement, a dead person laughing as illness healing, and a rotting, foul corpse as a family business flourishing. Only one corpse line is dark: an abandoned body read as being abandoned by others.
The 1906 Japanese translation of the Chinese Menglin xuanjie sits between the two, with readings that are more atmospheric than moral: many dead people gathered in silence meant a spell of long rain, and the dead quarrelling among themselves was good. Even a coffin falling from the sky, which looks like the worst of omens, it read as "其實却て吉兆", in truth the opposite. Together they show how differently cultures read the same image, and how little any of them read it as a death.
Finding it, and hiding it
These are readings from the old dream books, reported as history; no dream is a forecast.
What does it mean to dream of finding a dead body?
The body in the boot of a car, under the floorboards, washed up on a beach. No book here has a line for finding a corpse as such. The 1908 Japanese dream book read simply seeing a dead person as "相談ごと成る", talks coming to an agreement. Miller's 1901 dream dictionary read seeing a corpse placed in its casket as "immediate troubles to the dreamer". Psychologists hear discovery: something you had stopped looking at, an ended relationship, an old mistake, a feeling put away, coming back into view, often at the moment you are ready to deal with it.
What does it mean to dream of hiding a dead body?
Dragging it into the woods, sealing it behind a wall, the panic of almost being found out. This is one of the most common corpse dreams and none of the old books cited here has an entry for it. Psychologists read it as something ended but not finished with, a secret, a guilt or a past self being kept out of sight. The fear of discovery in the dream usually mirrors how much effort the hiding takes in waking life.
Whose body it was, and what it did
What does it mean to dream of a stranger's corpse?
You don't know who it is, only that it is dead and you are there. The 1908 Japanese dream book has no line for a stranger's body, but read an abandoned corpse as "凶人に見放さるゝことあり", being abandoned by others. Psychologists read the stranger as the unmet self, a quality or impulse not yet acknowledged. A stranger's corpse can be a part of yourself you have let go quiet, or an ending you haven't yet recognised as yours.
What does it mean to dream of a corpse that moves?
It opens its eyes, sits up, follows you. The Chinese Zhou Gong dream list, in its 1880 print, has a cluster of these: a dead person coming out of the coffin read as a guest arriving, a dead person weeping as quarrels, and a dead person standing up as very bad. The 1906 translation of the Menglin xuanjie read a dead person suddenly alive as news from far away. Psychologists, who also read zombie dreams this way, hear something that was supposed to be over and isn't: a conflict, a habit, a demand that keeps getting back up.
What does a corpse dream mean psychologically?
Psychologists rarely read a corpse in a dream as being about death. Death in dreams tends to mark transition, the end of one chapter and the unformed beginning of the next, and the corpse is what is left over: the part of the change that still has to be dealt with. Where a grave dream is about something laid to rest, a corpse dream is usually about something that hasn't been yet.
What the dreamer does with the body tells most. Finding it suggests something returning to awareness; hiding it, something being kept out of sight; burying or tending it, something being properly let go. Disgust, fear and an odd calm all turn up in these dreams, and the calm ones often come when an ending has already been accepted. If dreams like this regularly leave you distressed, that's worth mentioning to someone you trust. For the ceremony that comes after, see dreams about a funeral; for the resting place, dreams about a grave.
A question to sit with
What in your life is over, but hasn't yet been put to rest?
A dream book can tell you that Miller dreaded the corpse and the Meiji book thought embracing one brought riches. It can't tell you why the body in your dream was always in the house you grew up in. That shows only when your dreams are recorded and kept together. If these dreams leave you shaken, our guide to nightmares explains what is known about why they come. Dreamlock, on the App Store for iPhone, is a private dream journal made for keeping them together: it listens to your dream, paints it, and notices when the same places come back.