What Does Dreaming About Your Lips Mean?

Psychologically, the lips sit at the meeting of speech and sensuality — they shape words and they kiss, so they touch both communication and expression, and attraction, intimacy, and the sensual. A lips dream often centers on what you're expressing (or holding back) in words, and on desire, intimacy, and the sensual.

This carries several charges. As speech and expression, the lips touch your words, how you express yourself, and what you say or don't say — the shaping of speech. As sensuality and intimacy, the lips (and kissing) touch attraction, desire, romance, and the sensual and intimate. As secrets and restraint, 'sealed lips,' 'lips sealed,' or biting your lip touch holding something back, keeping a secret, restraint, or words held in. Problems with the lips — sealed shut, hurt, swollen, or unable to move — often mirror trouble expressing yourself, being silenced, or holding something in. The state and action matter: speaking (expression), kissing (desire, intimacy), sealed (secrets, restraint, silencing), or hurt (painful or blocked expression). Whether the lips speak, kiss, are sealed, bitten, or hurt usually mirrors speech and self-expression, sensuality and intimacy, secrets and restraint, and whether you're freely expressing or holding something back.

A Freudian reading would, characteristically, attend to the lips as a charged erogenous zone — tied to the early 'oral' pleasures and to sensuality, desire, and the kiss, as well as to speech and the shaping of words. The lips can carry the charge of sensuality and desire (the kiss, the sensual mouth) and of expression and what is spoken, held, or restrained.

Their kissing and their speaking carry the charge of sensuality and of expression. What the lips evoke — the desire of the kiss, the expression of the spoken, the restraint of the sealed — tends to point at the dreamer's relationship to sensuality and expression: the desire and intimacy of the sensual lips, the words spoken or held, and the meeting of the sensual and the expressive in this charged, doubly significant feature.

Scripture gives the lips great weight in speech — 'let the words of my mouth... be acceptable,' the prayer 'set a watch... keep the door of my lips,' the contrast of 'lying lips' with truthful ones, and the honoring or hypocrisy of 'this people honoureth me with their lips.' The lips touch this theme of speech — its truth, its guarding, and the heart behind it.

A lips dream, read this way, can touch speech, the words you speak, truth, or what is held back. A biblical sensibility might weigh the lips through the prayer to 'keep the door of my lips' — a guarding of speech toward truth and away from lying or empty 'lip service' — reading the dream as a prompt to mind one's words, to let the lips speak truth from the heart rather than flattery or falsehood, and to guard the door of the lips so that what passes them is good and true.

In Islamic sensibility the lips, as part of the mouth and the gateway of speech, touch the great responsibility of the tongue and speech — guarding one's words (speaking good or keeping silent), truthfulness over lying, and avoiding the harms of speech; the lips also touch the sensual and intimate, honored within their right place. The lips evoke speech and its guarding, truthfulness, and the sensual within its right place.

A lips dream, in this frame, might point to speech and what one says or holds back, truthfulness, intimacy, or restraint. Held with humility, it can invite the guarding of one's speech (the lips a gate to be minded — speaking good or staying silent, truthful over false), and the honoring of intimacy and sensuality within its right and dignified place — letting the lips speak what is good and true, and meeting the sensual with modesty and dignity.

In a Hindu frame the lips, shaping speech and sacred sound, touch the power of the word and right speech (vak, sacred speech, and the discipline of true, kind, beneficial words), and the sensual and intimate (the domain of Kama, honored within balance). The lips evoke speech and sacred sound, and the sensual within balance. The lips evoke the shaping of speech and sacred sound, and sensuality held in balance.

A lips dream, in this frame, can point to speech and expression, truthfulness, sensuality and intimacy, or restraint. The tradition's note attends to speech and the sensual: the lips as shapers of speech (vak) — to be true, kind, and beneficial — and of the sensual (Kama, honored within balance and dharma) — an invitation to mindful, truthful, uplifting speech, and to meeting sensuality and intimacy with awareness and balance, honoring both the word and desire in their right measure.