What Does Dreaming About a Bed Mean?

Psychologically, the bed is where you rest, recover, are intimate, and are most private and vulnerable — and so it most often touches rest, intimacy, and the private self: a need for rest and retreat, your intimate or sex life, comfort and security, and the most private, vulnerable part of your life. The bed is the most intimate piece of furniture there is, and its state and what happens in it often mirror your rest, your intimacy, and your sense of safety and privacy.

This carries several charges. As rest and retreat, the bed touches a need for rest, recovery, and retreat — a longing to lie down, restore, and be at ease. As intimacy and sex, the bed touches intimacy, your sex life, and what's shared (or not) in the most private space. As comfort and security, a comfortable bed touches comfort, safety, security, and a settled private base. As the private, vulnerable self, the bed touches your most private, unguarded self — where you're most vulnerable and exposed. As illness or unrest, a sickbed touches illness and recovery; an unmade or strange bed, unrest, exposure, or an unsettled private life. Whether the bed is comfortable, unmade, shared, strange, or a sickbed usually mirrors rest and retreat, intimacy and sex, comfort and security, the private vulnerable self, and illness or unrest.

A Freudian reading would, characteristically, attend closely to the bed — the place of sleep, of intimacy and sex, and of the most private and unguarded self, bound up with rest, desire, and the intimate life. The bed can embody the place of rest and the unguarded self, and (in classical Freudian terms) the intimate and sexual life with all its desire and vulnerability.

Its comfort or its unrest carries the charge of rest and of the intimate. What the bed evokes — the rest of the comfortable bed, the intimacy of the shared one, the exposure of the strange or unmade bed — tends to point at the dreamer's relationship to rest and intimacy: the need for rest and retreat, the intimate and sexual life shared (or longed for) in the bed, and the vulnerability of the private, unguarded self.

Scripture's bed is the place of rest and of the private self — 'I will both lay me down in peace, and sleep,' the call to 'commune with your own heart upon your bed,' the bed wet with tears in grief, and the honoring (or defiling) of the marriage bed. The bed touches these themes of rest, the private nighttime heart, and the intimacy of the marriage bed.

A bed dream, read this way, can touch rest, the private heart, intimacy, or unrest. A biblical sensibility might weigh the bed through 'I will lay me down in peace, and sleep: for thou... makest me dwell in safety,' and 'commune with your own heart upon your bed' — reading the dream as a prompt toward restful peace and trust (the safe rest of one held by God), an honest communing with one's own heart in the private hours, and the honoring of intimacy and the marriage bed; and, where the bed is wet with tears, a tender acknowledgment of private grief brought before God.

In Islamic sensibility the bed touches rest and sleep (a sign and mercy of God — 'We made your sleep for rest'), the etiquettes of rest (sleeping and waking with the remembrance of God), and the intimacy of the marriage bed (honored within marriage). The bed evokes rest as a mercy, the remembrance of God at rest, and the intimacy of marriage.

A bed dream, in this frame, might point to rest and retreat, intimacy, comfort, or unrest. Held with humility, the bed can recall that sleep and rest are a mercy and sign of God ('We made your sleep for rest'), inviting gratitude for rest and the practice of lying down and rising with remembrance of God; and it can touch the honored intimacy of the marriage bed — reading the dream as an invitation to restful trust, gratitude for the mercy of rest, and the honoring of intimacy within its right place.

In a Hindu frame the bed touches rest and sleep (one of the states of consciousness the tradition examines — waking, dreaming, deep sleep), retreat and the private self, and the intimacy and comfort of one's resting place. The bed evokes rest and the states of sleep, retreat and the private self, and intimacy and comfort.

A bed dream, in this frame, can point to rest and retreat, intimacy, comfort, or the private self. The tradition's note attends to rest and the states of consciousness: the bed as the place of sleep and dreaming (states the tradition contemplates on the way to deeper awareness) and of retreat into the private self — an invitation to honor needed rest and the restoration of sleep, to a mindful relationship to one's private and intimate life, and perhaps to the awareness, even in rest, of the witness-self that underlies waking, dreaming, and deep sleep alike.