Dream interpretation

All 68 dreams

Each has its own page: the meaning in Thai dream lore, different versions of the dream, the psychology, the dream's tarot card and a table of lucky numbers by the night you dreamt.

Animals (23)

• Dreaming of a snake
• Dreaming of a naga (serpent king)
• Dreaming of an elephant
• Dreaming of a tiger
• Dreaming of a crocodile
• Dreaming of fish
• Dreaming of a dog
• Dreaming of a cat
• Dreaming of a chicken or rooster
• Dreaming of a pig
• Dreaming of a cow or water buffalo
• Dreaming of a horse
• Dreaming of a monkey
• Dreaming of a rat or mouse
• Dreaming of a rabbit
• Dreaming of a goat
• Dreaming of birds
• Dreaming of a turtle or tortoise
• Dreaming of a frog or toad
• Dreaming of a spider
• Dreaming of bees
• Dreaming of a gecko or lizard
• Dreaming of a centipede

The body (7)

• Dreaming your teeth fall out
• Dreaming of cutting hair or hair falling out
• Dreaming of blood
• Dreaming you are pregnant
• Dreaming of giving birth
• Dreaming of feces
• Dreaming you are naked

People, the dead and the sacred (9)

• Dreaming of a dead person or corpse
• Dreaming of your own death
• Dreaming of a relative who has died
• Dreaming of an ex
• Dreaming your partner cheats
• Dreaming of a wedding
• Dreaming of a baby
• Dreaming of a monk
• Dreaming of a ghost

Nature and the sky (9)

• Dreaming of a flood
• Dreaming of the sea
• Dreaming of fire
• Dreaming of rain
• Dreaming of an earthquake
• Dreaming of a mountain
• Dreaming of trees or fruit
• Dreaming of flowers
• Dreaming of the moon, sun or stars

Things that happen (10)

• Dreaming of falling
• Dreaming of flying
• Dreaming of being chased
• Dreaming of an exam
• Dreaming of being late or missing transport
• Dreaming of a car accident
• Dreaming of drowning
• Dreaming of being lost
• Dreaming of an argument or a fight
• Sleep paralysis (ผีอำ)

Objects and places (10)

• Dreaming of money
• Dreaming of gold
• Dreaming of a ring
• Dreaming of a house
• Dreaming of a temple
• Dreaming of a toilet or bathroom
• Dreaming of a key
• Dreaming of shoes
• Dreaming of eggs
• Dreaming of a coffin

How to use the dream tool

1. Recall the clearest image in your dream and type or pick it. If you saw several things, pick up to three, most striking first.
2. Choose the detail for each, such as a snake biting, coiling or white. If none fits, keep “overall”.
3. Choose which night and what time you dreamt. The Thai day changes at 06:00, so a dream at 3 a.m. on Tuesday counts as Monday night.
4. Tick the boxes if you were unwell, very full or preoccupied with the subject before sleep; the tool will tell you which kind of dream Buddhist texts would call it.
5. Read the result: the dream's tone, when Thai books say it shows, its tarot card, lucky numbers with the source of every digit, and what to do next.

Everything runs on your device; your dream is never sent anywhere.

Where dreams come from: four kinds in the Buddhist texts

The commentaries on the Pali Canon name four causes of dreams, the origin of words Thais still use today.

In the Milindapañha, the monk Nāgasena tells King Milinda there are six kinds of dreamers: those whose dreams come from wind, bile or phlegm in the body, those inspired by a deity, those dreaming from their own habits, and those who dream an omen. Only the last kind is true, he says, and dreams arise neither in deep sleep nor awake but in light “monkey sleep” (kapimiddha), not far from what science now knows: vivid dreams come in REM sleep, when the brain is highly active.

So the texts themselves teach that most dreams come from our body and thoughts. Before reading a dream as an omen, ask whether you were tired, unwell or thinking about the subject.

When in the night are dreams most telling?

Thai books divide the night into periods and count dreams closer to dawn as more telling. Boundaries and timings vary a little between versions; this is the most common one.

The belief overlaps with science. A night holds about four to six sleep cycles of roughly 90 minutes, and REM periods grow longer through the second half of the night, so pre-dawn dreams are longer, more vivid, more story-like and more often remembered.

Reversed dreams: why some frightening dreams are good signs

A key idea in Thai dream reading is the “reversed dream” (ฝันกลับ): something frightening or disgusting often means something good in waking life, and some pleasant things are warnings. Well-known examples:

• Dreaming of a dead person or corpse and Dreaming of your own death: long life and the end of misfortune
• Dreaming of feces and Dreaming of a toilet or bathroom: luck, more the dirtier you get
• Dreaming of a coffin: “lohng” (coffin) sounds like “lap” (fortune)
• Dreaming of fire: the household will prosper like fire
• Dreaming of money: money gained in a dream goes out in life, money lost comes in

Reversal does not apply to everything; most dreams are still read directly, and each dream page says which way Thai books read it.

Lucky numbers from dreams: how TarotMod works them out

We compared the dream numbers on several popular Thai websites and found the same dream given almost entirely different numbers, with no explanation of where they came from. TarotMod uses a system rooted in Thai astrology in which every digit can be explained.

1. Thai planet numbers 1–9 (the key digit). The planets are numbered in weekday order: Sun 1, Moon 2, Mars 3, Mercury 4, Jupiter 5, Venus 6, Saturn 7, Rahu 8, Ketu 9. An animal that is a planet's mount takes that planet: the elephant is Mercury's mount (4), the tiger Saturn's (7), the horse the Moon's (2) and the naga Ketu's (9). Other dreams are paired with the planet whose meaning is closest: corpses and coffins with Saturn, money and rings with Venus.

2. Planet strength. Thai legend says Shiva made the nine planetary deities from creatures counted out: the Sun from six lions, Mercury from seventeen elephants, and so on. These counts are the planets' “strengths”, used by Thai astrologers to time planetary periods. Add the eight strengths from the Sun to Rahu, 6 + 15 + 8 + 17 + 19 + 21 + 10 + 12, and you get exactly 108, a sacred number in Buddhism and Hinduism. The dream tool adds the strengths of what you saw into a “combined strength”.

3. The Thai year animals (the second digit for animals). An animal in the twelve-year cycle uses its year's position, and the units digit of that position is the second digit. The great serpent is the year of Marong (5), the small snake Maseng (6), which matches the familiar belief that big and small snakes give different numbers.

4. Tarot card numbers. Each dream has a card, chosen from the Rider–Waite–Smith imagery closest to the dream; the snake, for instance, goes with the Wheel of Fortune, which has a serpent sliding down beside the wheel. The card number makes the three-digit number, and for dreams that are not one of the year animals, the card number reduced to one digit is the second digit. Majors use their number (The Fool counts as 22, as in Greer's method), Minors their rank, with Page 11, Knight 12, Queen 13 and King 14.

5. The day you dreamt. The Thai planet number of the day goes in front of the pair to give that night's three digits.

Worked example. Dreaming of an elephant: the elephant is Mercury's mount, so the key digit is 4. In the Lanna version of the year cycle the elephant takes the twelfth year, so the second digit is 2, giving the pair 42 and 24. Its card is The Emperor, number 4, giving 404. Dreamt on Monday night (2) it becomes 242; on Wednesday after 18:00 (Rahu, 8), 842.

What each digit means, in Thai planetary terms and by the Major Arcana numbers:

A mathematical fact: every draw is random and has no memory. Every two-digit number from 00 to 99 has the same 1-in-100 chance, whether or not it came from a dream. The lucky numbers here are about meaning and peace of mind: use them to pick a personal number, phone number or licence plate, but not to make money decisions.

Dreams in history and religion

People have recorded dream interpretation for over three thousand years. One of the oldest dream books is the Egyptian papyrus known as Chester Beatty III, from roughly 1300–1200 BCE, which sorts dreams into good and bad much as Thai books do. In the 2nd century CE Artemidorus of Daldis wrote the five books of the Oneirocritica, separating dreams caused by your present state of body and mind from dreams that foretell, much as the Buddhist commentaries separate bodily dreams from omens.

In the Buddha's life story, Queen Maya dreamt that a white elephant holding a white lotus entered her womb before Prince Siddhartha was born. The future Buddha had five great dreams before his awakening, and King Pasenadi had sixteen dreams that the Buddha read as pictures of society in a distant future. All of them are told in King Pasenadi's sixteen dreams and the dreams in the Buddha's life. The best-known Thai dream manual is part of the Phrommachat (พรหมชาติ), a compendium of Thai folk divination.

The science of dreaming

In 1953 Aserinsky and Kleitman discovered rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and found that people woken from it usually report vivid dreams. Dreams were later found in other sleep stages too, though shorter and less story-like. During REM the brain switches off almost all muscle movement, which explains both being unable to run in a dream and Sleep paralysis (ผีอำ).

There are several theories of what dreams mean. Freud (The Interpretation of Dreams, 1899) saw them as repressed wishes; Jung as compensating for sides of ourselves we neglect, using symbols shared by all people. Hall and Van de Castle's content analysis (1966) and the continuity hypothesis found that most dreams carry on from the people, concerns and feelings of waking life. Revonsuo's threat simulation theory (2000) proposes that bad dreams rehearse danger, while Hobson and McCarley's activation-synthesis theory (1977) sees dreams as the brain making a story out of signals it fires during sleep.

Surveys of “typical dreams” in many countries keep finding the same themes. The figures below are the share of students who had had each dream at least once.

Researchers have found no evidence that dreams predict the future, but dreams say a great deal about what we fear and hope for, which is the real value of interpreting them.

Keeping a dream journal and coping with nightmares

• Keep a notebook or phone by the bed and write as soon as you wake, before getting up; most dreams fade within minutes.
• Note images, people, places and feelings; the feeling of a dream often explains it better than its symbols.
• Look for links to waking life; after a few weeks of notes your own patterns appear.
• Nightmares: many Thai families make merit, pray or pour water to dedicate merit, which genuinely calms worry, alongside enough sleep and less caffeine and screen time before bed.
• If nightmares are so frequent you fear sleep, or follow a traumatic event, see a doctor. Sleep specialists have effective treatments, such as rehearsing a new ending to the nightmare while awake.

Frequently asked questions