The platform, the doors, the slow pull away. Train dreams are among the most common travel dreams, and among the most specific: the train has a timetable, a track and a destination printed on the front, and almost none of it is in your hands. That is usually where the dream begins.
| Variant | What the old books read | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Seeing a train | A journey ahead | Miller 1901 |
| Missing the train | Missing a car: being foiled in advancing one's prospects | Miller 1901 |
| Riding past your stop | No entry in any book cited here | none |
| A crowded train | No train entry; sharing a boat with others as trouble over one's dwelling | Yume handan jikkensho 1908 |
| A train crash | No train entry; a boat or cart breaking apart as inauspicious | Zhougong dream book 1880 |
| An unknown station | No entry in any book cited here | none |
| On a train with no track | Worry over an affair that later brings profit | Miller 1901 |
What does it mean to dream about a train?
Miller's 1901 dream dictionary (Ten Thousand Dreams Interpreted) is the one old book here that knew the train, and it gives it three entries. Under "Train", seeing one move meant a journey soon to be made, and freight trains were "an omen of changes" tending to the dreamer's elevation. Under "Railroad", the track itself was a warning: business would need close attention, "as enemies are trying to usurp" the dreamer, and an obstruction on the line indicated "foul play" in one's affairs. Under "Cars", the American word of the day for railway carriages, seeing them denoted "journeying and changing in quick succession".
The older books simply predate it. The two Meiji dream books this site uses, the 1908 Yume handan jikkensho and the 1906 Japanese translation of the Chinese Menglin xuanjie, have no train, and neither does the Chinese Zhougong dream book (1880 print). What they do have are boats and carts. The 1906 book read riding a boat or cart up into the sky as setting out somewhere, and added that rising high on something hollow was dangerous in the extreme unless a virtuous person was guiding it. The 1908 book repeated the same warning in its own words. It is not a train, but it is the same worry: being carried somewhere fast, by something you are not steering.
So the readings below report Miller where he speaks, borrow the nearest boat or cart where the Asian books do, and say so where no book has anything.
Catching it, missing it, riding past
These are readings from the old dream books, reported as history; no dream is a forecast.
What does it mean to dream of missing a train?
You reach the platform as the doors close, and the carriages slide away with their lights on. Miller's 1901 dream dictionary, under "Cars", read missing one as being foiled in an attempt to advance one's prospects. The modern reading is close: a window closing, a chance that ran on someone else's timetable. The dream belongs to the family of being late, and the useful question is often not what you missed but what you were carrying when you missed it.
What does it mean to dream of missing your stop?
You look up and the station sign is already behind you; the next stop is somewhere you have never heard of. No book cited here has an entry for riding past one's station. Psychologists hear a lapse of attention more than a failure: something in waking life moved on while you were looking elsewhere, and the dream asks what you were distracted by. If the feeling was relief rather than panic, part of you may not have wanted to get off.
What does it mean to dream of a crowded train?
Shoulders pressed against shoulders, no seat, no air, the doors that won't quite close. Miller has no entry for a crowded carriage. The 1908 Japanese dream book, writing of boats, read sharing a boat with other people as trouble to come over one's dwelling, and the Chinese Zhougong dream book read the same scene as moving house. Miller's nearest line is about company rather than crowds: under "Train", finding oneself on top of a sleeping car meant a journey with an unpleasant companion, one the dreamer would try to avoid. Psychologists usually hear pressure from other people: a schedule shared with too many, a space in waking life where your own room has shrunk.
Where the train went
What does it mean to dream of a train crash?
The carriage jolts, the lights go out, metal screams somewhere ahead. There is no train crash in any book cited here. The Zhougong dream book (1880 print) read a boat or cart broken to pieces as inauspicious, and Miller's "Cars" entry warned that standing on the platform of a moving street-car meant attempting something dangerous, safe only if the ride ended without accident. Psychologists read the crash as momentum gone wrong: a plan laid on fixed rails meeting something it could not swerve around. See also car crash dreams.
What does it mean to dream of arriving at an unknown station?
The doors open onto a platform you don't recognise, a name you can't read, no one else getting off. No old book here has an entry for it. The modern reading sits close to being lost: a transition where the old route has ended and the new one hasn't shown itself. People often report this dream after a move, a new job or the end of a relationship, when the familiar names on the line have changed. Curiosity and dread in this dream are both common, and which one you felt is usually the clue.
What does it mean to dream of a train with no track?
The train glides on across fields, over water, through the air, with nothing underneath. This is the one strange scene Miller did record: being on a train moving smoothly with no track, he wrote, meant being "much worried over some affair" that would in the end prove a source of profit. Psychologists hear something running on trust rather than structure, a plan going well that no one quite knows how to explain.
What does a train dream mean psychologically?
Psychologists notice that trains carry the parts of life that run on rails: careers, timelines, courses already laid. That is what separates a train dream from a car dream, where the dreamer is usually at the wheel. On a train you choose only whether to board and where to get off. Boarding the wrong train often accompanies the sense of a life proceeding efficiently in a direction never quite chosen; missing one, a window closing.
The dream's real question, in this reading, is who laid the track, and whether it still goes anywhere wanted. People often meet train dreams in seasons of fixed schedules: the last year of a degree, a long contract, a plan made years ago and still running. The station you were heading for in the dream, and how you felt about it, tends to say more than the train.
A question to sit with
Which part of your life is running on a track someone else laid, and would you still buy that ticket today?
Miller could tell you that a freight train meant a change for the better. He couldn't tell you why your trains always leave from the station of the town you grew up in, or only before a deadline. That shows only when your dreams are recorded and kept together. Dreamlock, on the App Store for iPhone, is a private dream journal made for keeping them: it listens to the dream you record, paints it, and notices when the same platform comes back.