Dreaming of space : what can this symbol evoke?

What is lacking when everything is close

A cluttered room does not have too many objects : it has too little emptiness between them. What hampers is never what occupies, it is the absence of what does not occupy.

Dreams often use this figure for situations where nothing is superfluous and everything is too close. A schedule without gaps, a family where everyone knows everything, a life full of good things without one unclaimed hour. Nobody acted badly, and one suffocates.

The question it poses is concrete : where in your days is there emptiness? Those who dream of lacking space generally lack nothing else.

Space that becomes too large

The opposite excess exists and is dreamed as often : a vast empty room, a plain without edge, a home too large for what remains in it. Space is no longer lacking, and nothing fills it.

Dreams use this form after departures. Children gone, a separation, a retirement : the available volume is the same as before, and has become disproportionate. It is not solitude, it is a scale that no longer matches.

What to remember is what you were doing with that volume. Occupying it, crossing it, or staying in a corner tell three different relations to a place become too large.

The amount available changes the reading

• A cluttered room where one can no longer move — a lack of emptiness, not an excess of objects.
• A day without a single gap — the same applied to time, which dreams treat as a space.
• A vast empty room — a scale no longer matching what remains.
• Looking for somewhere to be alone — the commonest form, and the simplest to hear.
• A space narrowing during the dream — a pressure increasing with no event occurring.
• An open horizon after a closed place — the relief of a constraint lifted, sometimes before it really is.

A psychological reading, not a ready-made box

Depth psychology takes an interest in available space because it conditions everything else : without an interval no movement is possible, and that is as true of time as of places. It notes that such dreams often arise in full and satisfying lives, which makes them hard to formulate. Other readings retain the opposite excess and what it says about departures.