Heart attack in a dream: what does it mean?
A dream of the heart failing is frightening and is reported by people in perfect health as often as by anyone else, and the plain medical facts belong first.
How do the four traditions 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. The four often disagree, and that is the point: a symbol rarely means one fixed thing, and the distance between Freud, Jung, modern research and myth tells you more than any single verdict could.
Freud
Freud held that bodily sensation during sleep enters dreams directly, and chest discomfort, indigestion or a racing heart on waking will all be built into a story by the dreaming mind. He would still ask what story it chose and who was present in it.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.Jung
For Jung the heart carries associations with feeling rather than with circulation in most Western imagery, and a dream of its failure may image something about capacity for feeling rather than about health. That reading is available and should not crowd out the physical one.
Our summary of a Jungian reading, in our own words, not Jung's. See Jung, ed., Man and His Symbols (1964).Modern
This should be said plainly. A dream about a heart attack is not a warning of one and there is no reliable research showing dreams detect cardiac disease. It usually follows waking health anxiety, a family history, or somebody else's illness. Real chest pain, breathlessness or pain in the arm or jaw needs emergency medical help immediately, and that is true whether or not anyone has been dreaming.
Our summary of the continuity hypothesis, named by Calvin Hall and Vernon Nordby, The Individual and His Dreams (1972). Its correct scope is disputed; see Domhoff (2017) and the replies to him.Mythological
The heart is treated as the seat of courage, feeling or the person across a very wide range of traditions, and rarely as a pump. That framing survives in ordinary language long after the anatomy was understood.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Frazer; Bulfinch).How can writers use this symbol?
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. Written for novelists, screenwriters and poets who need the symbol to actually work, and it ends with something to try.
In literature
Sudden cardiac death is one of the few remaining ways fiction can remove a character without warning, which makes it a device, and the honest writing about it is nearly always about the survivors' first hour.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What it does in a story
It ends a life without preparation, which is realistic and structurally brutal: no goodbye scene is available. Its risk is that it can look like an author solving a problem.
Genre conventions
Medical fiction uses the resuscitation. Literary fiction uses the phone call. Family sagas use it for the generation change, which is where it does the most work.
How to subvert it
Write somebody having one and surviving, and the six months of rehabilitation nobody puts in a novel.
Try this
Write the phone call that tells a family. Four hundred words. The caller must be a stranger.
Only the first of these names a source. What a symbol does in a story, how genres treat it, how to invert it and what to try are our editorial judgement as writers and editors, not findings from a body of research. They are offered as craft opinion and should be argued with.