Dreams About Family: Parents and Siblings

Parents and siblings are among the longest-running relationships most people have, and they turn up in dreams accordingly - sometimes as they are now, sometimes as they were decades ago, sometimes doing things they would never do in real life. This page covers both. For a parent or sibling who has died, see Dreams About a Dead Relative; for dreams in which a family member dies, see Dreams About Someone Dying.

Common Forms of This Dream

• conflict with a parent, echoing a real disagreement or not;
• a parent behaving out of character, or treating you as a child;
• seeking a parent’s approval;
• old sibling rivalry replaying itself, sometimes exaggerated;
• a sibling appearing as a child again, rather than at their current age;
• for only children, a brother or sister who doesn’t exist.

What Research Can and Cannot Tell Us

Family members are a steady presence in dreams. In Calvin Hall and Robert Van de Castle’s dream norms, family members made up 9% of the characters in men’s dreams and 15% in women’s. Rosalind Cartwright’s research suggests that how much someone is on your mind affects how often they appear: in her study of people going through divorce, the more concerned someone was about their former spouse, the more often the ex turned up in their dreams. The same principle plausibly applies to a parent you’re worried about, or a sibling you’ve argued with. See Why Do Dreams Include People We Know?

What research doesn’t support is reading a family dream as a coded message about a specific current event or hidden conflict.

Parents

Parent dreams often draw on the whole history of the relationship rather than just its current state - which is why an adult can dream of being scolded, protected or ignored by a parent in ways that belong to childhood. Dreams of seeking a parent’s approval are frequently read as a wish for approval or validation more generally, sometimes from someone else entirely, such as a manager or partner. A parent behaving out of character is often read as the dream exploring a side of the relationship that doesn’t get expressed in waking life.

Siblings

Sibling relationships often span the longest shared history of all, and sibling dreams frequently replay old patterns - rivalry, protectiveness, competition - even when the real relationship has long since moved on. A sibling appearing as a child again often takes the dreamer back to that period of shared life. For only children, an invented sibling is sometimes read as an unexplored quality or a different version of oneself, though that’s a popular convention rather than a tested idea.

What Freud Made of Family Dreams

Family relationships were at the centre of psychoanalytic dream theory. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud singled out dreams of a parent or sibling dying, when they come with real grief, as a “typical” dream, and argued that they express old, long-buried wishes from childhood - rooted, for siblings, in the rivalry of early family life. He knew how unwelcome that reading would be; he wrote that he expected readers to object to it.

Few dream researchers today accept this interpretation, and there’s no controlled evidence for it. A more ordinary explanation is that people dream about the deaths of those they love because those are the losses they fear most. Still, Freud’s emphasis on how early family life echoes through adult dreams is one reason parent and sibling dreams are taken so seriously in popular interpretation. See Freud’s Theory of Dreams.

Historical Interpretations

Questions to Ask Yourself

• Does the dream echo a current dynamic with this person, or something from much further back?
• Is there someone - in or outside the family - whose approval you’re seeking right now?
• If a sibling appeared as a child, does that period of your shared history feel relevant at the moment?
• Is this family member on your mind for a particular reason?

When the Dream Is Distressing

An occasional unsettling family dream, including one involving conflict, is common and not a cause for concern. If dreams about family are tied to real difficulty in those relationships and are affecting your sleep or mood, talking it through with someone you trust, or a counsellor, is likely to help more than interpreting the dream.