What Does Dreaming About a Guitar Mean?

Psychologically, the guitar — and music generally — is the language of feeling and self-expression, so it most often touches expressing yourself, your emotional state, and your creative voice. Music expresses what words often can't, so a guitar dream frequently mirrors the wish (or ability) to express your feelings and your creativity, and how freely your 'voice' is flowing.

This carries several charges. As self-expression and creativity, the guitar touches your creative voice, the wish to express yourself, and creativity finding (or seeking) an outlet. As emotion, the music you play touches your emotional state — joyful, melancholy, passionate — and the expression of feeling. As harmony, being 'in tune' (or out of tune) touches harmony or disharmony in yourself or your life, whether things are 'in tune.' As passion and romance, the guitar (the serenade) can touch passion, romance, and the expression of love. As performance and being heard, playing for others touches performing, being heard and seen, and self-expression before others. A broken, out-of-tune, or unplayable guitar can mirror blocked expression, disharmony, or a creative voice that's stuck or silenced. Whether you play beautifully, struggle to play, the guitar is out of tune or broken, or you perform usually mirrors self-expression and creativity, your emotional state, harmony or disharmony, passion, and whether your creative voice is flowing or blocked.

A Freudian reading would attend to the guitar and its music as the expression of feeling — the giving of voice to emotion through art, evoking creative expression, the release of feeling into form, and (in the serenade) the expression of desire and romance. The guitar can embody the creative voice, the expression of feeling and desire, and the harmony or discord of what is expressed.

Its playing — harmonious or discordant — carries the charge of expression and of the feeling given voice. What the guitar evokes — the release of playing, the longing of the serenade, the frustration of the out-of-tune — tends to point at the dreamer's relationship to expression and feeling: the creative voice seeking outlet, the emotion given form in music, and the harmony or discord of what one expresses and feels.

Scripture is full of music as the voice of the heart toward God — David's harp, the call to 'praise him with the... harp,' to 'sing unto the Lord a new song,' and the making of 'melody in your heart to the Lord.' The guitar, as an instrument of music and expression, touches this theme of the heart's expression in music, praise, and the making of melody.

A guitar dream, read this way, can touch self-expression, the heart's melody, joy, or harmony. A biblical sensibility might weigh the guitar as an instrument of the heart's expression — an echo of the call to 'sing unto the Lord a new song' and make 'melody in your heart' — reading the dream as a prompt toward genuine, heartfelt expression and the making of melody, the giving of voice to one's feeling and one's joy, and the harmony of a heart in tune and expressing what is good and true.

In Islamic sensibility music and instruments are viewed with varying scholarly opinion, yet the guitar as an image touches the recognizable themes of expression, emotion, and the harmony (or discord) of the heart and one's state; the beauty of sound and the expression of feeling are met within the tradition's values. The guitar evokes expression, emotion, and the harmony of one's state.

A guitar dream, in this frame, might point to self-expression, one's emotional state, harmony or disharmony, or creativity. Held with humility, it can invite reflection on how one expresses one's feelings and inner state, the harmony (or its lack) within oneself and one's life, and the channeling of emotion and creativity toward the good and beautiful — attending to whether one's inner 'tune' is in harmony, and expressing one's feeling and state in wholesome ways.

In a Hindu frame music is sacred and profound — the veena of Saraswati (goddess of music, knowledge, and the arts), music (sangita) as a path of devotion and even of the divine (nada brahma, sound as the divine), and the harmony and expression of feeling through it. The guitar, as an instrument, evokes this theme of sacred music, expression, and harmony. The guitar evokes music as expression and devotion, and the harmony of sacred sound.

A guitar dream, in this frame, can point to self-expression and creativity, emotion, harmony or disharmony, or even devotional expression. The tradition's note attends to music and harmony: music as a sacred path of expression and devotion (echoing Saraswati's veena and the divine nature of sound, nada brahma) — an invitation to heartfelt, even devotional, self-expression, to the harmony of being 'in tune' within oneself, and to the expression of feeling and creativity as something that can uplift and connect to the sacred.