What does it mean to dream about cheating?
Dreaming of cheating, your own or a partner's, more often reflects trust, insecurity, or neglect in waking life than a literal affair.
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 a forbidden wish or a fear of betrayal, desire and guilt entangled.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.Jung
Jung would see a split between what the dreamer shows and what they want, or a projection of a disowned need onto the partner.
Jungian concept (our summary).Modern
Continuity ties infidelity dreams to waking insecurity, jealousy, or feeling neglected, rarely a prediction of real betrayal.
Continuity hypothesis (our summary).Mythological
Myth turns on famous betrayals, the broken vow that brings ruin, from the loves of the gods to the oaths that start wars.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Bulfinch).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
Othello is the essential text here because nothing actually happens: the betrayal is entirely constructed, and Shakespeare gives the audience certainty while withholding it from the man who needs it. Tolstoy takes the opposite route in Anna Karenina, where the affair is real and the interesting material is everything around it, and Flaubert had already shown in Madame Bovary that the betrayal a reader remembers is usually of a life rather than a person.
Shakespeare, Othello (c. 1603); Flaubert, Madame Bovary (1856); Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1878). All public domain.What it does in a story
Infidelity in fiction is a device for exposing what a relationship was actually built on, which is why the discovery scene matters more than the act. Suspicion is usually the stronger engine, because it makes the suspecting character do the work and lets the reader watch them build a case.
Genre conventions
Crime and thriller writing uses it as motive and needs it proven. Literary fiction is far more interested in the aftermath and often opens after the affair has ended. Romance treats it as a disqualifying act, which is why it so rarely appears there except as backstory for a character who has been wronged.
How to subvert it
The convention assumes the betrayed party wants the truth. Write one who works hard not to find out, and make the effort of not knowing visible on the page. Deliberate ignorance, maintained daily, is a more uncomfortable portrait of a marriage than any confrontation.
Try this
Write a scene in which one character has clear evidence available to them and chooses a route around it. Do not let them acknowledge the choice, and do not let the narration explain it.
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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Bulfinch's Mythology
Our standing reference for Greek and Roman myth material. Public domain and free to read online.
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