What does it mean to dream about contempt?
Contempt in a dream often marks a looking-down on someone or something, and who you scorned is usually worth weighing against what you may be refusing in yourself.
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 would read contempt as a feeling that may guard against something the self fears or once desired. He held that scorn can be a way of holding off a temptation or a likeness one will not own. The disdain may cover a closeness the waking self denies.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.Jung
Jung would ask what the scorned figure carries, since contempt often falls on the shadow, the disowned part we cannot bear to see in ourselves. He treated such judgment as a mirror worth examining. The disdain can mark something in the self asking to be reclaimed.
Jungian concept (our summary).Modern
Continuity research ties dream contempt to waking conflicts and judgments the mind keeps turning over. Some accounts read scorn as a rehearsal of a real grievance or comparison. The disdain is best read against whom you are judging, and why, in waking life.
Continuity hypothesis (our summary).Mythological
Myth punished the contemptuous, the mortal who scorned a god, the proud one who mocked what they should have honored. Disdain for the sacred drew swift reckoning. Across cultures such tales warned that scorn often blinds the one who feels it to their own danger.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Bulfinch; Brewer).