The Dream Well

Our feelings towards our hair are very personal and intimate, often running very deep and associated with our sense of identity and how we wish the world to see us.  To dream of hair can often be tied to our feelings of confidence or insecurity.

If we dream of cutting or colouring our hair, it can be  sign that we are breaking away from an identity we have outgrown and trying to create a new one for ourselves, and discarding that which is no longer useful for us.  We can understand if this new direction is a positive one by looking at whether our hair is healthy, indicating a “healthy choice,” or alternatively by examining the feelings that arise in the dream.  Does changing your hair make you feel liberated and free, excited and confident, nervous or brave, younger or more mature and responsible, maybe more practical or more attractive?   We can also look at how we would describe our hair, then use those words to describe ourselves.  Is the hair in our dream unruly or easy to manage?  Is it wild, or well-groomed?  Is it tied up or flowing free?

Hair can symbolise our “crowning glory,” that which are most proud of in our personality, our appearance or our achievements.   Hair in dreams can also relate to our feelings of sexuality and sensuality, our desire to be admired, and our wish to enjoy the sensuous side of life.  But some of us use our hair to hide behind.  Could a dream of hair be asking us to reveal our true selves?

Hair has played important roles in history and mythology.  Samson’s hair was a symbol of strength and virility, and when his hair was cut he lost his power. Lady Godiva covered her naked body with her long flowing hair. Dreaming of lost, falling or cut hair that creates a negative feeling may indicate a sense of loss of power, or maybe of feeling exposed somewhere in waking life.

Some hair dreams are not about the hairs on our head, but may be about hair growing in places that we would not expect, that we do not like, or hair that it is unusually dark, wiry or strange in some other way.  These kind of dreams can be disturbing, but generally have rather benign meanings.  They may indicate a new idea cropping up in a place we weren’t expecting, or can be a sign of a wilder, untamed side our personality seeking expression.  Hairy things are often scary to us, such as hairy monsters or hairy spiders.  Hair showing up in a dream this way can be asking us to confront something we are afraid of, or reconsider something we may find unattractive at a surface level and ask us to look beyond appearances.  Either way, there is a lesson to be learned from things we have an initial aversion to if we stay long enough to see what else might be going on.

If we dream of grey hair or long beards can often indicate age and all that we associate with that.  We may think of age in this way as the acquiring of wisdom and respect, or as of the gradual loss of capacities that we fear in old age.  It may even be we have a reaction to age that is a mixture of these too extremes.  To dream of going grey or growing a long beard may ask to examine our feelings towards aging, gaining experience, or playing a more  senior role somewhere in our life.

To understand dreams of hair, it can help to look at where on the body the hair is (see the posts on different body parts) and if necessary, what colour the hair is if that seems significant (see post on colours.)  We can also see if the hair seems wild and unruly, or lustrous and beautiful, to indicate how we feel about our image, and what we are projecting to the outside world.

Dreams of hair invite us to look inside and see if what we show the world is what we really are, and to check how we are growing and caring for ourselves.  Dreams of hair ask us to consider our confidence and our vanity, and how strong, seductive, exposed or vulnerable we may feel.

Photo by Adrian Fernández on Unsplash