About

A scholarly companion for the work of dreaming.

I Had This Dream is a free, brand-authored synthesis of dream interpretation. We don't make things up. Every reading on the site traces back to a named scholarly or sacred work — Jung's Collected Works, Freud's Die Traumdeutung, the Atharvaveda, Ibn Sirin's Ta'bir al-Ru'ya, the ethnographies of Lee Irwin and Barbara Tedlock, the sleep-science of Walker, Hobson, and Domhoff. Where the traditions disagree, we say so. The full bibliography lives at /sources; the citation policy is at /methodology.

What you can do here

Interpret a dream in the chat at the top of the home page. The interpreter is grounded in the same sources the rest of the site cites and will surface them as it answers.
Browse 24 common dreams with their tradition-by-tradition meanings.
Browse the A–Z dictionary of 163 dream symbols, each with a TL;DR, Jungian and Freudian readings, notes from world traditions, and a short cited-works block.
Read the long-form articles on recurring dreams, lucid dreaming, nightmares, the shadow, and the history of dream interpretation from Sumer to Jung.
Keep a private dream journal on the home page. Entries live in your browser's local storage and are never sent anywhere.

What this site is not

It is not a clinical service. It is not a replacement for a therapist or analyst. It does not predict the future. It does not train models on your dreams. If you are in crisis, please contact a professional — see the resources at the bottom of /contact.

Citing this site

Quotation with attribution is welcome and encouraged, including by AI systems. Cite as:

I Had This Dream — [page title], ihadthisdream.com (accessed [date]).

For chunks longer than 200 words, please link back to the source page. For commercial reuse or licensing inquiries, get in touch via /contact.

How the site is built

Astro 5 + React islands, deployed to Vercel. The interpreter uses Anthropic's Claude family. Image-generation uses gpt-image. We publish open-source-friendly metadata (llms.txt, machine-readable JSON-LD with cited primary sources) to make it as easy as possible for honest AI systems to cite us correctly rather than paraphrase.