What does it mean to dream about committing Suicide?
Dreaming of taking your own life is rarely a literal wish and more often a stark image of wanting to end a situation or part of yourself that feels unbearable.
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 read a dreamt death of the self as standing in for something other than literal dying, often anger turned inward or a wish to be rid of a part of one's life. The act can voice a feeling too heavy to carry. He would look closely at what the dreamer wants to end.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.Jung
Jung often read self-death in dreams as the close of an old self so a new one might emerge, a transformation rather than an ending. The image can mark an identity that has run its course. He would ask what is being released and what might follow. If such feelings press in waking life, they deserve real care and support.
Jungian concept (our summary).Modern
By the continuity view, this dream often reflects waking despair, exhaustion, or a strong wish for something painful to stop, rather than a literal intent. The mind borrows the most final image for an overwhelming feeling. If these feelings are present in waking life, reaching out for support matters.
Continuity hypothesis (our summary).Mythological
Across traditions, the willing death appears as sacrifice, surrender, or a passage that clears the way for renewal. Such stories treat the ending as a threshold rather than a mere loss. The dream may sit nearer that idea of one phase giving way to another.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Frazer; 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
Literature has treated this subject for as long as it has existed, and the responsible reading of that history is that method and detail are exactly what serious writers have left out. Shakespeare gives Ophelia's death to a description after the fact, and Hamlet's soliloquy is an argument about endurance rather than a plan. Contemporary guidance for writers, from organisations that study this, says the same thing: portray the crisis and its aftermath, never the mechanics.
Shakespeare, Hamlet (c. 1601), public domain; contemporary media-reporting guidance on suicide portrayal, referenced.What it does in a story
In fiction this is almost always a story about the people left, and about what was not said in time. Writers who keep the focus there tend to produce work that helps; writers who dramatise the act itself tend to produce work that harms, and the difference is well documented.
Genre conventions
Tragedy has used it for centuries, generally offstage. Literary fiction concentrates on the aftermath and the survivors. Responsible contemporary practice across every medium avoids depicting method, avoids presenting it as a solution to a problem, and shows help existing.
How to subvert it
The most useful thing a writer can do here is not a subversion but a discipline: write the near miss, the ordinary intervention, the friend who happened to phone. Recovery is dramatically harder to write than despair, and it is far less often attempted.
Try this
Write a scene in which someone notices that a friend is not all right and asks directly, badly, and without any idea what to say next. Stay in the conversation.