What does it mean to dream about doppelganger?
A doppelganger in a dream often pictures a double of yourself, a disowned side made visible, or unease about identity and who is truly you.
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 wrote of the double as something once familiar that returns made strange, a part of the self split off and met as another. The uncanny copy can carry the wishes the waking self denies. Ask what your double did that you would not.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.Jung
Jung would see the double as the shadow given a face, the rejected self standing opposite you. Meeting it can be unsettling but also a chance to own what you have cast out. The dream may ask you to recognise the double as your own.
Jungian concept (our summary).Modern
Threat-simulation theory suggests the dreaming brain can stage a copy of the self as a danger, rehearsing a fear about identity or rivalry. It can follow times you felt at odds with yourself. Notice whether the double opposed you or simply mirrored you.
Threat-simulation theory (our summary).Mythological
In many traditions meeting one's double is an ill omen, a sign of division or of death foretold. The figure marks the dread that the self can be split or replaced. The image tends to ask which version of you the dream took to be real.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Brewer; Frazer).For writers
The same symbol, read as craft material rather than as a dream. What it does on the page, how genres use it differently, and what happens when you turn it inside out.
In literature
In Irish and Scottish tradition the fetch is your own double, and seeing it in the evening means death, though a morning sighting is said to mean long life. Poe's William Wilson is followed his whole life by a double who intervenes at every dishonest moment, and when he finally kills him he finds he has destroyed himself.
The Irish and Scottish fetch tradition; Poe, William Wilson (1839). Both public domain.What it does in a story
A double is the self observed from outside, which is why the figure is used equally for conscience and for omen. It is unbearable specifically because it cannot be dismissed as somebody else's opinion.
Genre conventions
Gothic and psychological fiction use the double as suppressed self. Thrillers use the impostor. Folk tradition uses the fetch, where the timing of the sighting determines the meaning, which is a lovely piece of precision.
How to subvert it
Use the morning fetch. Seeing your own double at dawn means a long life, and a character who sees theirs and cannot remember whether the good version is the morning or the evening one spends the day working it out.
Try this
Write somebody who has received an omen and cannot remember which way round it reads.
The books behind these readings
These are the books this entry actually draws on. Where a text is in the public domain we link the free copy first, because you should not have to pay for something you can read for nothing.
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The Interpretation of Dreams
The source behind every Freud reading in the dictionary. This is the 1913 Brill translation we adapt from, and it is free to read online.
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Man and His Symbols
The accessible Jung, and the honest place to start for the archetype material our Jung readings summarise.
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The Golden Bough
Cross-cultural context for the myth readings. Public domain and free to read online.
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