What does it mean to dream about blood?
Blood tends to picture vitality, injury, or strong emotion, and bleeding a felt sense of being drained or hurt.
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 connected blood to bodily and sexual themes and to anxiety, sometimes tied to fears around injury or the body's processes. Its force in a dream usually marks something felt as urgent and physical rather than abstract.
Freudian reading (our summary).Jung
For Jung blood is life-force and sacrifice: what must be given for something to be born or transformed. Losing blood can image lost vitality; shed blood can mark a costly but necessary change.
Jungian concept (our summary).Modern
Cognitively blood often pictures vitality, injury, or strong emotion, and bleeding can track a felt sense of being drained or hurt. Context decides the weight: a small wound reads very differently from a flood.
Continuity hypothesis (our summary).Mythological
Blood is the seat of life and the medium of covenant and sacrifice across cultures, from biblical blood of the covenant to the sacrificial rites recorded throughout ancient myth. It binds kinship, debt, and the price of renewal.
Frazer; Bulfinch; Miller (1901).