What Does Dreaming About Your Knees Mean?

Psychologically, the knees are about support, flexibility, and the capacity to bend — they bear your weight and hold you upright, yet also let you bend, kneel, and yield rather than stay rigid. So knees most often touch your support and ability to stand, and your flexibility — the capacity to bend without breaking, to be flexible rather than rigid. Knees are where standing-strong meets the ability to bend.

This carries several charges. As support and standing, strong knees touch firm support and the ability to hold yourself up; weak, buckling, or 'weak in the knees' touch feeling unable to support yourself, buckling under pressure, fear or overwhelm, or shaky foundations giving way. As flexibility, the knee's bending touches the ability to bend, adapt, and yield rather than stay stiff and break. As humility and submission, kneeling (bending the knee) touches humility, submission, surrender, reverence, or being brought low (to one's knees). Injured knees touch a damaged ability to support yourself or move forward. Whether the knees are strong and supportive, weak and buckling, kneeling, or injured usually mirrors your support and ability to stand, your flexibility and capacity to bend, humility and submission, and whether you feel held up or are buckling under pressure.

A Freudian reading would attend to the knees as the joint of support and bending — bearing the weight and yet bending, kneeling, and yielding, evoking the capacity to stand and to submit, the support that holds and the flexibility that bends. The knees can embody the support of standing and the bending of submission, the holding-up and the yielding, the firm and the flexible.

Their strength or buckling, their standing or kneeling, carries the charge of support and of submission. What the knees evoke — the firmness of strong support, the failure of buckling, the lowering of kneeling — tends to point at the dreamer's relationship to support and submission: the capacity to stand and hold oneself up, the buckling under pressure, and the bending, kneeling, yielding of humility and submission.

Scripture gives the bending knee great weight — 'unto me every knee shall bow,' the kneeling in prayer and reverence ('he kneeled... and prayed'), and the strengthening of 'the feeble knees' ('strengthen ye the weak hands, and confirm the feeble knees'). The knee touches this theme of bowing in reverence and submission, and the strengthening of the feeble knees in weakness.

A knees dream, read this way, can touch support, humility and submission, weakness, or reverence. A biblical sensibility might weigh the knees between the bowing of reverence and submission ('every knee shall bow') and the promise to 'confirm the feeble knees' — reading buckling or weak knees as met by the One who strengthens the feeble, and kneeling as the posture of humility, reverence, and submission, an invitation to bend the knee rightly and to be strengthened where one is weak.

In Islamic sensibility the knees hold meaning especially through prayer — the kneeling and prostration (the knees bent to the ground in humility and submission before God), the very posture of worship and humility; the knees also touch support and the strength to stand. The knees evoke the humility and submission of prayer, reverence, and support.

A knees dream, in this frame, might point to support and standing, humility and submission, weakness or buckling, or reverence. Held with humility, it can recall the knees' role in the prayerful posture of submission before God (the bending of the knee in worship and humility), and invite both the strength to stand and the humility to bend — meeting weakness or buckling with reliance on God who supports, and honoring the humility and submission the bent knee represents.

In a Hindu frame the knees touch the postures of reverence and humility (bending and bowing before the divine or the revered, the prostration of pranama) and support, as well as flexibility — the bending that yields rather than breaks. The knees evoke reverence and humility (the bow), support, and flexibility. The knees evoke the bow of reverence, support, and the flexibility that bends without breaking.

A knees dream, in this frame, can point to support and standing, humility and reverence (the bowing knee), weakness or buckling, or flexibility. The tradition's note attends to reverence and flexibility: the bending knee of humility and reverence (as in the bow before the divine or revered), and the flexibility that yields rather than breaks — an invitation to humility and reverence where they are due, to the strength to stand and the flexibility to bend, and to support held with both firmness and the grace of bending.