What does it mean to dream about bones?
Bones usually point to what is essential and enduring, the structure beneath the surface, or to mortality and what remains.
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 the lasting frame of the self, and at times death and the body stripped to its core.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.Jung
Jung would see the bare structure of the psyche, what endures when everything else falls away, and the ground of renewal.
Jungian concept (our summary).Modern
Continuity ties bones to waking thoughts of strength, the essentials of a situation, or of aging and mortality.
Continuity hypothesis (our summary).Mythological
Dry bones are raised to life in vision and prophecy, and across myth the bones hold the seed of resurrection, the part from which the whole returns.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Frazer; Bulfinch).