Planets in HousesSun in the First House: What It Means
Sun in the first house puts identity and purpose into the department of self and first impressions. Here is what it does, where it strains, and which sign that means for your rising sign.
Dreams & Symbols
Dreaming About Dogs: Meaning and Research
Dreaming about dogs is usually read as loyalty, protection, or a relationship with an obligation in it, and tends to show up during friendships, and situations where somebody is depending on you. What is actually known about dreams, why dictionaries do not work, and how to read your own.
The short answerDreaming about dogs is usually read as loyalty, protection, or a relationship with an obligation in it. In practice it tends to show up during friendships, and situations where somebody is depending on you. The useful part of a dream is almost never the symbol, though: it is the feeling attached to it and what was happening the day before.
What dreaming about dogs is usually taken to mean
The common reading is loyalty, protection, or a relationship with an obligation in it. That is the answer most pages give and it is worth having, because it is the shared vocabulary people use when they talk about this dream.
What it tends to coincide with: friendships, and situations where somebody is depending on you. That is a more useful statement than the symbolic one, because it is checkable against your own life rather than against a dictionary.
| Common reading | Loyalty, protection, or a relationship with an obligation in it |
| Tends to appear during | Friendships, and situations where somebody is depending on you |
| Worth recording | The feeling, before the images. It decays fastest and carries the most |
| Worth ignoring | Any fixed symbol meaning, including the one above, if it does not match your week |
Worth knowing about this particular dreamWhether the dog is friendly, threatening or in distress is the reading. The animal is the frame, not the message
Where to read next
What the research actually supports about practices like this is worth reading alongside, since writing a dream down is expressive writing and that has a real literature behind it. The 12th house is where astrology puts sleep and the unconscious, and the Moon in Pisces is the placement closest to this subject.
What is actually known about dreams
More than most pages on this subject will tell you. Dreaming happens across all sleep stages and is most vivid in REM, which occupies about a fifth of a night and comes in cycles of roughly ninety minutes. Almost everybody dreams; the difference between people is recall, not whether it happens.
The best-supported finding is the continuity hypothesis: dream content mostly continues waking concerns rather than departing from them. People who are worried about work dream about work. That is less romantic than a dictionary and it is also the reason dreams are worth paying attention to at all.
The other serious proposals are that dreaming supports memory consolidation, which has real experimental support, and that it is a form of threat rehearsal, which would explain why being chased is the most common nightmare in every population studied. None of these require a dream to carry a message.
Why dream dictionaries do not work
Because symbols are not shared. Water does not mean the same thing to somebody who grew up swimming and somebody who nearly drowned, and no dictionary knows which one you are. The evidence for fixed symbol meanings is essentially nil, and the practice of assigning them is about a century old rather than ancient.
What does hold up is the feeling. People are consistent about the emotion in a dream even when they disagree completely about what the images meant, and the emotion is the part that maps onto waking life. A page that tells you what a snake means is guessing. A page that asks what you felt about the snake is doing something useful.
How to read your own dogs dream
Three questions, and none of them is what does dogs mean. What did you feel, during and immediately after. What was unresolved in the last two days. And has this happened before, and if so what was going on then.
If the answers point at something, that is your reading. If they do not, the dream may genuinely have been your brain processing the day, which is the most likely explanation for any given dream and the one no dictionary will offer you.
The method that actually gets you something
- Write it down within a few minutes of waking. Dream recall decays faster than almost any other memory and most of it is gone in ten minutes.
- Write the feeling first, before the images. The feeling is the part that carries information and the part you will lose first.
- Note what happened yesterday. The continuity hypothesis is the best-supported thing in this field and the day before is where most dream content comes from.
- Look for repeats across weeks rather than meaning in any single dream. A recurring dream is data. One dream is noise.
When a dream is a medical matterRecurrent nightmares that disturb sleep, dreams that begin after a trauma, and vivid dreaming that starts with a new medication are all worth mentioning to a doctor rather than to a dictionary. Recurrent drowning or suffocation dreams in particular have an association with sleep apnoea, which is common, treatable and frequently undiagnosed. Nothing on this page is medical advice.
Does astrology say anything about dreams?
Less than you might expect, and the honest answer is that the two are separate practices. The 12th house covers sleep, the unconscious and what is hidden, and the Moon covers instinct and the inner life, so a chart has places where this subject lives. But no placement predicts a dream and nothing in the tradition claims otherwise.
The 12th house is covered here, and your Moon sign is the placement closest to this subject.
Questions people ask
What does dreaming about dogs mean?
It is usually read as loyalty, protection, or a relationship with an obligation in it. It tends to appear during friendships, and situations where somebody is depending on you.
Is this dream a warning?
No. Nothing in dream research supports a predictive reading of any dream symbol. The best-supported finding is that dreams continue waking concerns rather than forecasting anything.
Why do I keep having this dream?
Recurring dreams generally track an unresolved waking situation. The repetition is the useful signal, far more than the images are.
Do dream dictionaries work?
Not really. Symbols are personal rather than shared, and there is no evidence for fixed meanings. The feeling in the dream is the part that holds up.
RubyAstro writes about astrology for reflection and self-understanding. Nothing here is medical, legal or financial advice, and none of it is a prediction of events. Read our full disclaimer.
Keep reading
Planets in Houses
Planets in HousesSun in the Second House: What It Means
Sun in the second house puts identity and purpose into the department of money and values. Here is what it does, where it strains, and which sign that means for your rising sign.
Planets in HousesSun in the Third House: What It Means
Sun in the third house puts identity and purpose into the department of communication and siblings. Here is what it does, where it strains, and which sign that means for your rising sign.
Dreams & SymbolsDreaming About Falling: Meaning and Research
Dreaming about falling is usually read as insecurity, or a loss of footing somewhere, and tends to show up during instability in work, money or a relationship, and often simply poor sleep. What is actually known about dreams, why dictionaries do not work, and how to read your own.
Dreams & SymbolsDreaming About Flying: Meaning and Research
Dreaming about flying is usually read as freedom, release, or a situation you have risen above, and tends to show up during periods just after something ended, especially something constraining. What is actually known about dreams, why dictionaries do not work, and how to read your own.
Dreams & SymbolsDreaming About Your Ex: Meaning and Research
Dreaming about your ex is usually read as something unresolved, not necessarily about them, and tends to show up during a current relationship hitting a familiar pattern, more often than actual lingering feeling. What is actually known about dreams, why dictionaries do not work, and how to read your own.