Money
Money is our primary means of acquiring the goods and services we need, but it also enables us to do what we desire (travel, participate, educate ourselves, etc.). Money symbolizes our resources and opportunities; in dreams, it can represent our "life force" or psychic energy (libido). Poverty suggests incapacity, stagnation, or depression. These symbolic expressions of money, wealth, and poverty frequently appear in folktales.
Price and Sacrifice
Dreams sometimes use money to express the price we are willing or expected to pay, or what we are prepared to part with in order to obtain something. However, it might also be the case that what we want is nearly free and easily accessible.
What one spends money on in a dream may illustrate where one is investing one's (psychological) resources, which in turn could be linked to what one expects to gain in return (see below). This may be accompanied by a sense of justice or injustice, as we will return to, which is a recurring theme in many contexts: a broken relationship one "invested" in, the apprentice's efforts that lead nowhere, or that brother who always seems to have such undeserved luck, and so forth.
Energy, Opportunities, and Abilities
Having a lot of money provides great freedom of choice, but lacking financial means can leave us trapped in a situation. In this way, money sometimes symbolizes opportunities. In Swedish, the word förmögen means both wealthy and capable.
The lack of opportunity is another expression of a lack of energy. A person who has lost his creativity and is "stuck" in a situation might dream of having no money to take the train or plane—they are unable to move forward, they are "incapable." Conversely, a wealthy man in a dream might represent "something with great energy," with many possibilities for achieving its goals.
Receiving money in a dream may indicate that whatever provides the value symbolizes the source of new energy and opportunities. Money, gemstones, and treasures always suggest value and libido.
An abundance of "undirected libido," however, can have a negative quality. For example, if in a dream one carelessly scatters money around, like the protagonists in Hans Christian Andersen's tales The Flying Trunk and The Tinderbox, it could illustrate wasting energy in an unfocused and pointless manner, suggesting that it might be wise to channel one's libido into something meaningful instead.
In fairy tales and other expressions of the unconscious’ imagery, wealth, treasures, and so on often symbolize potential libido.
Materialization and Spiritualization
Everyone can have ideas and visions, but it often takes money to realize them. A poor man will not be able to turn his business idea into reality, fulfill the dream of traveling to a distant place, buy his dream house, or host a grand party. A rich man, on the other hand, can test his idea in reality and give wings to his dreams. Money, which is so abstract, much like psychic energy, thus provides the means to materialize and concretize.
However, the reverse is also true. The humble man with no significant resources can embody what is grounded, simple, and industrious. The wealthy man loses his connection to the earth, grows wings, and leads a detached life, which tends— as many celebrities have shown—to become self-destructive.
What We Deserve
Money can be an expression of what we earn, the value we receive for our efforts. Closely linked to this is what we believe we deserve. We often feel that we deserve more or better, whether in terms of money or life in general. This, in turn, connects to what we believe we are entitled to, what we expect. Such feelings are typically tied to the mother archetype, and our relationship with money often mirrors our relationship with the mother complex.
A simple example might be that someone without a positively charged mother complex, who has lacked access to that nourishment, may find it difficult to obtain, metaphorically speaking, the money he feel he deserves in life. Conversely, someone with a positively charged mother complex might expect to receive what he need without much effort.
Security and Safety
Related to the above—money and the mother complex or archetype—is the fact that money provides us with security and safety. Those who lack money risk being vulnerable, often alone, and living in uncertainty, while those with ample money likely enjoy a more socially satisfying life and operate from a much more secure foundation. The poor person is motherless—homeless in the world—while the wealthy one knows he always have "mother" within reach.
Justice and Fair Exchange
The discussion above relates to the issue of justice, which runs deep in human nature—money reflects our sense of fairness. Most people recognize the obvious injustice that one person is born rich while another is born poor. This reality is one reason for the taboos (see below) that surround the symbol of money in modern society.
Similarly, we tend to become emotional when we feel we aren’t receiving equivalent value for what we give (e.g., an unfairly low salary), or conversely, when we receive far more than our effort warranted. Such imbalances often appear in life and in our dreams: we didn’t get what we thought we’d receive, or we’re surprised by an unexpectedly positive opportunity when we hadn’t made much effort at all.
Taboo
Our relationship with money still retains certain magical or superstitious qualities. Most people avoid talking about how much they earn or how much they lost in a deal. Children have no idea what their parents’ salaries are or how much they have in their accounts, even though parents constantly emphasize the importance of money, creating a strange double standard. The child understands that something significant is at stake, but it’s not openly discussed.
We don’t ask others how much they earn, nor would we ask a hostess what her dress or sofa cost. At the same time, many people are very cost-conscious, deeply preoccupied with money, boast about a bargain they found, or proudly display their new car.
The emotions we attach to money are often a source of conflict, envy, and hostility. In short, we all have a "money complex" that finds expression in dreams.
We may also have a shameful relationship with money. If we lack money, we might feel embarrassed and try to hide that fact—but even having a great deal of money can be something we prefer to conceal from the world.
Spirituality
Alchemists used coins as a metaphor for "the precious substance." In ancient Greece, among other places, coins were associated with deities. There is also something mystical about money, as it only has the value that we agree upon it representing – in this way, it almost possesses a spiritual quality; the fact that we cannot do anything with money itself (eat, build, etc.) yet still place such high value on it underscores this.
In the past, physical money had a positive value in a way that we do not necessarily associate with today; it was attributed with various magical properties and was linked to superstition. Whoever had a coin under their doormat was never poor, money could ward off evil, and so on. Such collective associations can be relevant in dream interpretation.
Trade and Hermes
Money enables efficient trade, especially between distant places. In this way, it is connected to roads, journeys, and civilization; religiously or mystically, with Hermes/Mercurius.
Lower Value
The other side is that there is something trivial about "money" – everyone has it (more or less), everyone talks about it, and it’s everywhere. We can even see money not as a "treasure" but as something dirty and low. "Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s," as Jesus said (Mark 12:17). Despite all that has been said, we might associate money with something superficial and petty, in comparison with the higher values of life, and thus despise greed.
Debt, Owing Someone Money
Dreaming that you owe someone money likely indicates that there is something you undervalue. For example, a dreamer might have a brief but fairly significant relationship with someone one summer, but non-sentimentally abandons it when autumn comes. In such a case, the dreamer might dream that she demands the money he owes her, symbolizing the "investment" (of libido, see above) he turned his back on, as if it were worth nothing at all; in other words, something he undervalues. The unconscious tends to value relationships differently than the conscious mind does.
Literal Meaning
Someone who has problems with money in his waking life and worries about it will likely dream about money or the lack of it; not being able to afford this or that, suddenly becoming rich, and so on, where money in the dream usually has a more concrete and down-to-earth meaning. (See also Gold and Wallet.)