What does it mean to dream about childhood?
Returning to childhood in a dream often points to memory, a longing for simpler days, or a part of yourself asking for attention.
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 placed great weight on childhood, holding that early wishes and scenes return in dreams in disguised form. To be a child again could revive an old desire or an unfinished feeling. He would ask what from those years the dream is reaching for.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.Jung
Jung saw the child as an image of the original self and of new beginnings, what is fresh and whole in a person. Meeting one's younger self can mean recovering something set aside or tending a wound. The child carries promise as well as the past.
Jungian concept (our summary).Modern
Under the continuity view, childhood dreams often follow nostalgia, stress that makes simpler times appealing, or contact with old places and people. The mind revisits what shaped it. The feeling tends to be tender, wistful, or comforting.
Continuity hypothesis (our summary).Mythological
Many traditions hold the divine child as a figure of hope and renewal, the small one who carries a great future. Stories of a golden early age, for a person or a people, recur across cultures. Childhood stood for innocence and for beginnings still open.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Bulfinch; Frazer).