What does it mean to dream about crying?
Crying in a dream often releases a grief or relief the waking self has held back, and you may even wake with the feeling still there.
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 emotion finding the outlet daylight denies it, the dream completing a feeling left unfinished.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.Jung
Jung would see a necessary discharge in the psyche, the thaw that lets a frozen sorrow move.
Jungian concept (our summary).Modern
Continuity and emotion-regulation research tie crying dreams to processing real grief, stress, or relief during sleep.
Continuity hypothesis (our summary).Mythological
Tears carry weight in myth, the weeping that moves even the gods, the mourning that must be given its due before life resumes.
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
Odysseus weeps repeatedly in Homer, and it is never treated as weakness; the tears are a formal signal that grief is being properly acknowledged. Medieval devotional writing went further and treated the gift of tears as evidence of genuine feeling. The modern suspicion of crying in fiction, that it is sentimental or manipulative, is a recent and quite narrow position.
Homer, Odyssey (c. 8th century BCE); the medieval devotional tradition of the gift of tears. Public domain.What it does in a story
Tears are the body overriding a character's account of themselves, which makes them the fastest available contradiction between what someone says and what is true. The useful detail is almost never the crying; it is what the character does with their hands and their face while it happens.
Genre conventions
Melodrama uses tears as the emotional receipt and asks the reader to feel along. Literary fiction distrusts them and often has a character cry at the wrong moment, or over the wrong thing. Comedy uses crying that will not stop, since duration is what turns grief into farce.
How to subvert it
The convention says tears release something. Write crying that resolves nothing and embarrasses everyone, including the person doing it, and let the scene carry on afterward with the problem entirely intact. Denying the catharsis is closer to how it usually goes.
Try this
Write a character crying in front of someone who has no idea how to respond, and write the scene entirely from the witness's point of view.
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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