Dreaming of repairing: what can this symbol evoke?

Recognising the damage

Before repairing, one has to have seen: the crack, the wobbly leg, the leak. Many repair dreams begin with this discovery, often on a familiar thing one used without looking at it. The dream then says: something has given way, and now you know it.

When the dreamer thinks “I have to repair it”, the repair becomes an obligation he takes upon himself. The question is twofold: what has been damaged, and why is it up to you to repair it?

What the repair lets show

In Japan, kintsugi repairs broken ceramics with a lacquer mixed with gold: the break is not hidden, it is highlighted. The repaired object is not as good as new; it bears its history, and is valued all the more for it.

The dream may use repair in this sense: not erasing a wound, a quarrel, a mistake, but integrating it. Other dreams show the opposite: repairing in haste, masking, gluing back so that nothing shows. The detail to look at is how you repair: carefully or hastily, alone or with help.

What is repaired changes the reading

• Repairing something in your house — restoring a foundation of your life: couple, family, health.
• Repairing an object that belonged to someone — taking care of a bond, or an inheritance.
• Not having the right tools — wanting to repair without yet having the means.
• A repair that does not hold — a problem dealt with on the surface, which comes back.
• Someone else repairs in your place — letting yourself be helped, or feeling dispossessed.
• Not daring to repair, leaving it as it is — waiting, or giving up, before what has been damaged.
• Repairing a step, a floor, a passage — strengthening what lets one go from one level to another.

A psychological reading, not a ready-made box

The psychoanalyst Melanie Klein made reparation an essential moment of development: the child who has felt that he could harm those he loves seeks to repair, and that is how he learns concern for others. Jung, for his part, took up the figure of the wounded healer: the one who heals because he himself knows the wound. Dreaming of repairing can thus speak of care for others as much as of work on oneself.