What It Means When You Start Dreaming About Your Childhood Home
All dreams have meanings, including the nostalgic ones that seem to come out of nowhere.
Pixel-Shot | Shutterstock Everyone dreams with varying frequency. Sometimes those dreams will be about completely random topics that you can’t even begin to imagine a reason for. And, sometimes, those dreams will take you to a nostalgic past that you thought you had forgotten.
Our dreams carry deep meanings, whether we understand them or not. Different dreams can hold different meetings, including very specific ones.
A dream expert shared what it means when you dream about your childhood home.
A TikTok content creator known as @dreamwithamanda said in her bio that she “[helps] you decode your dreams and get better sleep.” To do this, Amanda shares videos on different topics related to the meanings of certain dreams. In one post, she went over what it means if you begin dreaming about your childhood home.
“That old house in your dream, it’s not about the house,” Amanda explained. “Your childhood home often shows up when old patterns are being reactivated in your dream. It’s your system pulling up origin stories.” If you’re dreaming about your childhood home, it means that you’re reverting to a previous version of yourself and your world. “So ask, what part of me is still living in that version of myself?” Amanda said. “You’re not regressing. You’re remembering what shaped you.”
Dreaming about your childhood home doesn’t mean you’re literally moving backward in life and letting the past overtake your present. Rather, it means that your mind is on the things that were important to you growing up. You’re thinking about what made you who you are today.
Experts agree that dreams of childhood help you connect to the ways your past shaped who you are.
Leslie Ellis, PhD, a therapist and dream expert, explained why we often find ourselves dreaming about our childhood homes, citing how important they are to us and our growth. “Ideally, we attach to our childhood home because of the memories we have of being loved and supported,” she said. “It can be a time of freedom, and so poignant because we experience so many ‘firsts’ in our young lives.”
Ellis and dream interpreter Lauri Loewenberg offered several reasons why you could be dreaming about your childhood home. One was that you’re stuck on memories from that time in your life. “For example, if you dream of a particular room in the house, was there something that happened there that you can recall?” Ellis asked. “Dreams can unearth memories that may be asking for integration in the present.”
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They also said that dreaming of your childhood home can mean that “you’re reclaiming parts of your past” or that “you’ve grown and evolved.” Loewenberg said the latter of these two reasons may have you seeing the house a bit differently than it actually was. “Maybe certain rooms have changed, the furniture is different, there’s something different or updated about it — and that is usually representative of our growth and change since being that person that lived in that house,” she said.
All of these reasons back up Amanda’s theory that dreaming about your childhood home is a sign of returning to old patterns and remembering where you came from.
Everyone can interpret their own dreams differently, though.
Just because one person interpreted a dream you had a certain way does not mean that has to be the way you interpret it. For example, several people commented on Amanda’s post and said that the only dreams they had about their childhood homes were nightmares. Those would likely not be interpreted as focusing on rosy parts of your past merging with your present.
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Dr. Michelle Dreup, PsyD, DBSM, a behavioral sleep medicine expert, said, “That’s always what I tell people — the meaning that you ascribe to the dream is going to be much more meaningful than anything I ascribe to the dream. Because it’s probably something from your life that’s represented in that dream.”
Remember that no dream interpretation, no matter how wise, can replace your own intuition.
Mary-Faith Martinez is a writer with a bachelor’s degree in English and Journalism who covers news, psychology, lifestyle, and human interest topics.
