Dreaming about hair

• Appearance, and specifically the part of it other people comment on.
• Vitality and health, which is why illness so often features in the surrounding reports.
• Control, in the cutting dreams: whose decision it was.
• Identity, particularly where hair is culturally or religiously significant to the dreamer.

Cutting hair deliberately in a dream is frequently reported around a decision that has already been made, and dreamers describe it as satisfying rather than distressing.

Reports of hair growing back, or being longer than in life, tend to be pleasant and are often noted during recovery.

Hair coming out in handfuls is the distressing version, and it is reported during periods of stress and during actual illness.

Dreams of being shaved or cut against your will are reported less often and carry more force, and dreamers connect them to loss of control rather than to appearance.

Continuity again does most of the work: people undergoing treatment that affects hair report hair dreams, and people going through a change of self-presentation report the cutting version.

The structural similarity to teeth dreams is the interesting part. Both involve a part of the body that is visible, socially loaded, and detaches without pain, and both are reported in the same emotional register.

Hair is heavily regulated across cultures and religions, in what may be covered, cut, kept or offered, and dream readings track those systems closely.

Classical Islamic manuals treat hair extensively, with length, cutting and covering all read differently. Western folk tradition reads hair loss as a loss of strength, an association old enough to appear in the Samson narrative and durable enough to still be quoted.

Stress is associated with an increase in distressing dream content, which covers this cluster.

No study has established a specific meaning for hair in dreams. What is documented is the frequency of body-part dreams generally and their association with waking concern about the body.

• Was it your hair? Dreams about somebody else's are a different report.
• Was the change chosen? Cutting and losing are two dreams.
• Has anything actually changed with your hair or health recently?
• Who saw it? Hair dreams frequently include an audience, and the audience carries the feeling.

Recurring hair-loss dreams are reported during long stressful periods and during treatment, and they tend to track the situation rather than persist beyond it.

Where they recur without an obvious cause, they belong in a group with any teeth dreams, since the two so often travel together.