You fall asleep and you’re back there again. Your old house. Your school. Your workplace. Maybe somewhere that doesn’t even exist in real life… but you know your way around. You know which door leads where, and which room to avoid.
If you’re searching for the meaning of recurring dreams like this, here it is: you’re not visiting that place. You live there. The dream place is a part of your own psyche, and you keep going back because there’s still something there for you to find.
I’ve worked at the same place for fifteen years, and apparently that’s not enough, because I keep going back in my dreams. The last time, I found a whole level I didn’t know existed.
Carl Jung’s house dream
If you’ve read anything I’ve written before, you know everything in the dream is you. The characters, the animals, all of it (even your ex). Most people stop there and treat the place as a backdrop.
It isn’t. The place is you too.
Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist who spent his whole life working with dreams, had a famous one about this. Early on, he was Freud’s right-hand man.
In the dream Jung was on the upper floor of a house, in a furnished salon. He went down a floor and it became a medieval room. Further down, a Roman cellar. Under a stone slab, a staircase led into a cave, with bones, broken pottery and two skulls.
When Jung told Freud, Freud skipped over the whole house and fixated on the skulls. Whose were they? Who did Jung wish was dead?
The darkest reading possible. In Jung’s way of seeing things, death in a dream is almost never about someone dying. It’s about transformation, something ending so something new can begin. Jung knew what his dream meant. The house was a picture of his mind, and the deeper he went, the older it got.
The place is you
Only the dreamer can really know what a dream means. Not Freud, not a dream dictionary, not me. You.
What Jung found, and what rings true, is that the dream landscape is the structure of your psyche. So when a place feels familiar in a dream, you’re not remembering somewhere. You’re recognising a part of yourself.
For Jung, it was his house. For me, it’s my workplace. For you, it might be somewhere you’d rather not be at all.
When you keep trying to escape
For a lot of people, the recurring place isn’t somewhere they explore. It’s somewhere they’re trying to get out of. So if that place is you… why are you trying to escape it?
Someone shared a dream on Reddit about a place they’ve been back to so many times they’ve lost count. A cedar lodge on the side of a lake, smaller on the outside than on the inside. Every time, they’re being chased or ridiculed by dream characters. It’s an unhappy place, and yet it still feels like home.
Inside, it’s a maze. Twists and turns, staircases that lead to dead ends. Mazes are a great dream symbol: you kind of know where you need to go, but you can’t get there directly. That’s often a reflection of everyday life. The path is sort of known, but you keep getting lost.
Outside the lodge, through the woods, there’s always a little cabin where they feel safe. That’s a part of themselves they’re comfortable with. Something they’ve already integrated, a place to retreat to.
Only they can know for sure, but that’s what I’d look at.
Same place, always a little different
Here’s the thing to watch for. Even when you go back to the same dream place, it’s never exactly the same. If you write your dreams down, you’ll notice something has always shifted.
The scenes change, but the underlying message stays the same. You keep going back because you’re not finished. There’s a part of you that still needs attention.
Meet the guardian of the threshold
Joseph Campbell, famous for writing about the hero’s journey, built a lot of his work on Jung’s, and he talks about the guardian of the threshold. Apply that to dreams and it’s the figure, an aspect of you, that stands between where you are now and where you need to be.
Face it, meet it, and it unlocks that new area of you. It can be scary, like a monster, or it can be a guide, often a little old man or a little old woman.
So next time something’s chasing you, try turning round to face it. Or when you wake up, ask: what part of myself was I running from?
Now for my workplace. I’ve learnt so much there, many of them the hard way. I keep going back in my dreams, and every time it’s a little bit bigger. Last time, the yard was enormous. It took forever to get from one side to the other.
I noticed the far corner looked different, so I went over. There was a whole new section, and an old lady standing there. My guardian of the threshold. She told me there was a way into another part of the workplace and showed me… a fireman’s pole.
A strange thing to dream about! But it was a shortcut to a whole new level of myself, just like Jung’s dream. I couldn’t remember her exact words when I woke (which is why I always say: write your dreams down straight away). What she was telling me was that all those lessons had given me access to more of myself.
When the monster shrinks
Size in a dream shows how much of you is available. The yard grows because I’m growing. More space means room for more of you.
It works the other way too. Remember being chased by monsters as a kid? When you turn and face them, they shrink. I had one dream where a big monster shrank so much it turned into a fluffy little key ring.
What does a key ring hold? The key that unlocks the next part of you.
How to read your recurring dream: four things to look at
Next time you’re back in that place, don’t just think “oh, here again”. Look at:
- Size. Is the place, or what’s in it, bigger or smaller than before?
- Movement. Are you being chased, struggling, or moving freely and exploring?
- Feeling. Happy? Worried? Curious? Afraid?
- Change. What’s different this time? This is the important one, and you can only spot it if you’ve written your earlier dreams down.
What’s behind the door you haven’t opened yet?
I still go back to that work yard. It’s not that I can’t escape it. I’m not trying to. It’s about discovering more of who I am… learning to live in more of it.
What’s behind the door you haven’t opened yet? More of you.
Questions people ask about recurring dreams
Why do I keep dreaming about the same place?
Because that place is a part of you, and there’s still something there that needs your attention. Notice what’s changed each time and how you feel there.
What does it mean to dream about a place I’ve never been to in real life?
It’s still a part of your psyche. The fact that it feels familiar is the point: you’re recognising an area of yourself rather than a real location.
Are recurring dreams a bad sign?
No. They’re persistent rather than bad. They keep coming back because the message hasn’t been received yet, and they often change or stop once it has.
How do you stop a recurring dream?
Work with it. Write it down, face whatever’s chasing you, and look at the four things above. Once you meet what the dream is pointing at, it usually moves on.
See a dream interpreted from start to finish
If you want to see this used on a full dream, I’ve made a free video where I interpret someone’s dream from start to finish.