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  1. Lifestyle
  2. Mental Health

Why You Almost Never Dream About Money

By:
Dan Kadlec
4 min read
You're more likely to be dreaming about cats than checkbooks. - rubberball—Getty Images
You're more likely to be dreaming about cats than checkbooks. rubberball—Getty Images

In your sleep, do you dream about money? Surprisingly, most people do not—at least not literally. And if you believe the thoughts that enter your head while you sleep actually mean something, this may suggest we’re shockingly content.

Dream analysts say that winning the lotto or a boat, or getting a bonus aren’t even among the top 50 most common thoughts in slumber. Money is nowhere to be found on a state-by-state chart of popular dream symbols. The dream map is dominated by things like “family” in Texas, “cats” in New York, “pigs” in Nebraska, and “sex” in perhaps the most honest states Missouri and New Hampshire.

We each have three to nine dreams per night, and most of us think about money everyday. Yet up and down the list of most common nighttime visions are things like dancing, school, guns, drugs, movies, and food. Nothing about greenbacks. Zilch. “This shows that people place more importance on the quality of their real happiness,” says dream expert Anna-Karin Bjorklund, author of Dream Guidance. “If you never dream about money, chances are your happiness is not related to feeling powerful or having the means to acquire material possessions.”

That’s good, right? Our subconscious is telling us that our pets and friends and experiences are what we really care about—even if we’re carrying a credit card balance and haven’t earned a decent raise in five years. To a degree this confirms much of what polls have shown since the Great Recession: a broad rediscovery of basic values and things that money can’t buy.

But before we congratulate ourselves on being phenomenally high-minded, we need to dig a little deeper. For one thing, materialism creeps onto the dream list in the form of “beach house” in Alabama; in the fourth richest state in America, Connecticut, “shopping” and “malls” make the top-five list. “Cruise ship” sneaks onto the list in Florida.

Besides, dreams are rarely literal—and thankfully so because on the list of popular dream subjects we find cheating, adultery, cemetery, and murder. If you dream about doors opening or being given the keys to an important room—that may be dreaming about a cash windfall, says dream expert Kelly Sullivan Walden, author of It’s All in Your Dreams. And, she says, “If you’re stressed about money in your waking life, you might find yourself dreaming of a leaky faucet, animals fighting over food, or your teeth falling out.”

Got that? How you view whatever you are dreaming is far more important than the dream itself. “If you have a dream where someone is stealing your vegetables, this could indicate that you feel what you’ve been planting has been taken away,” says Bjorklund. According to dream expert Lauri Loewenberg, author of Dream On It, financial stress also shows up in dreams as:

“Dreams are symbolic and speak to us in metaphors,” says Loewenberg. “If you want to look for your dreams to help you with your financial situation, they will, but they may not use money to get the message across.” So maybe a good deal of our subconscious nighttime adventures are about money after all. We just don’t know it.

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