What does it mean to dream about killing Someone?
Dreaming that you kill someone is usually a stark image of wanting to be rid of something, a trait, a tie, or a pressure, rather than any real wish to harm.
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 held that dreams give cover to feelings the waking mind refuses, including anger and the wish to be free of someone. Killing in a dream may voice hostility you would never act on. He would ask who the victim is and what they represent to you.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.Jung
Jung might read the act as an attempt to put down a part of yourself, often projected onto the other figure. Killing can show the ego trying to suppress what it will not own. He would ask whether that part needs destroying or rather integrating.
Jungian concept (our summary).Modern
By the continuity view, dreaming of killing often reflects waking frustration, resentment, or a strong wish for something to stop. The dream borrows a violent image for an everyday feeling of having had enough. It rarely points to literal intent.
Continuity hypothesis (our summary).Mythological
Many myths turn on a killing the hero must carry, from the slaying of a monster to a kinship death that brings lasting consequence. The act can mean release or a burden of guilt, depending on the tale. The dream may carry that same double weight of relief and unease.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Bulfinch; Brewer).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
Dostoevsky spends most of Crime and Punishment on what a killing does to the person who did it, and the murder itself arrives early and is over quickly, which is the structural argument of the book. Macbeth works the same way: the deed is offstage and the play is about the couple afterward. Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart compresses the whole pattern into a few pages by making the confession the story.
Shakespeare, Macbeth (c. 1606); Poe, The Tell-Tale Heart (1843); Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment (1866). All public domain.What it does in a story
Killing is the most irreversible act available to a character, which makes it useful precisely once. The tradition is nearly unanimous that the interesting material is on the far side of it, so a writer who stages the act in detail and then moves on has usually spent the wrong half.
Genre conventions
Crime fiction needs the mechanism, because the mechanism is the puzzle. Literary fiction needs the conscience. Action treats it as a resolved cost of the genre and rarely lets it register at all, which is a convention worth noticing before adopting.
How to subvert it
The expected aftermath is guilt. Write a character who feels nothing and is frightened by feeling nothing, and let the fear of their own indifference be the whole engine. It sidesteps the moralising the trope usually forces while going somewhere darker than guilt could.
Try this
Write a character doing something completely ordinary a week after an irreversible act, and convey the act only through what they no longer do. Never state what happened.
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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