Biblical tradition
Moon in Biblical dream interpretation
The sun, moon and stars appear in one of the most famous dreams in the texts, and they are read as people.
What this page is
What follows describes what the biblical material says about particular images, where it says it, and how the tradition of reading it developed. It is not a claim that a dream about any of these things means anything.
Joseph dreams that the sun, the moon and eleven stars bow to him, and his father immediately reads the sun and moon as his parents and the stars as his brothers. The interpretation is given in the text itself, which is unusual.
That reading is specific to that family. It is not a rule that the moon means a mother, and the passage does not present it as one; Jacob is reading his own household into his son's dream and reacting badly to it.
Elsewhere the moon belongs to the created order and to the calendar, and the prophetic material uses its darkening as a sign of upheaval. None of that is dream interpretation.
Worth knowing
This is the clearest case in the whole tradition of a single contextual reading being generalised into a dictionary entry it was never meant to be.
What is actually recorded about dreaming of moon
The moon is one of the few dream symbols people usually report positively. It appears more often as light and atmosphere than as an object, and reports cluster around calm, strangeness and being watched over rather than watched.
The moon entrySources and reviewed references
1 reference. What these labels mean
- 1.