What does it mean to dream about death?
Death in a dream rarely means literal death; far more often it marks the ending of a phase so something new can begin.
Four ways to read it
Each reading below comes from a named tradition and a cited source, so you can see where it came from and decide what fits your dream.
Freud
Freud cautioned that a death in a dream rarely means literal death. It could express buried wishes, guilt, or unresolved feeling toward the person, and dreams of a parent's death often reached back to old childhood conflicts rather than present intent.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.Jung
For Jung death in dreams is most often symbolic: the ending of a phase, an identity, or an attitude so that something new can take its place. It marks transformation, the necessary close of one chapter of the self.
Jungian concept (our summary).Modern
Modern dream science reads death imagery as the mind processing change, loss, and endings rather than predicting them. It frequently surfaces during real transitions, grief, or major life shifts, picturing the felt fact that something is ending.
Cognitive dream research (our summary).Mythological
Myth frames death as passage, not full stop: the underworld journeys of Greek and Mesopotamian heroes, the Otherworld of Celtic tradition, the cycles of death and rebirth across religions. To dream of death was often read as change or renewal in the old dream-books.
Artemidorus; Bulfinch; Miller (1901).