DreamloreDream dictionary › Common dreams › Cats
What does it mean to dream about a cat?
Cats are one of the animals people look up most after a dream. Miller's entry on cats is long and mostly gloomy; the lines below are quoted exactly, with the one passage where Freud mentions a cat.
What Miller wrote (1901)
To dream of a cat, denotes ill luck, if you do not succeed in killing it or driving it from your sight. … If the cat attacks you, you will have enemies who will go to any extreme to blacken your reputation and to cause you loss of property. … To hear the scream or the mewing of a cat, some false friend is using all the words and work at his command to do you harm.
Read the full entry for “Cats” →
What Freud wrote
Freud, summarising Karl Scherner's theory of dream symbolism:
Thus we have a kind of dream-book as a guide for the interpretation of dreams, by means of which bodily sensations, the conditions of the organs and of the stimuli may be inferred from dream images. … Thus the image of a cat expresses an angry discontented mood, the image of a light-coloured bit of smooth pastry the nudity of the body.
Your dream is not a dictionary entry
A dream about cats comes with a place, other people and a feeling, and the old books read the same image very differently depending on those details. Dreamlore takes your whole dream, spoken or typed, finds the passages that fit it in Miller and Freud, quotes them word for word, and leaves you one question to reflect on. The journal stays on your phone.
Read your own dream in Dreamlore
Full dictionary entries
Questions
What does it mean to dream about a cat?
Miller's 1901 dictionary reads a cat as ill luck unless you drive it away, a cat that attacks you as enemies, and the mewing of a cat as a false friend. Freud mentions a cat only when describing Karl Scherner's theory, in which the image of a cat expresses an angry, discontented mood. These are old readings to reflect on, not a verdict on your dream.
Where do these quotes come from?
They are quoted verbatim from public-domain books: Gustavus Hindman Miller's Ten Thousand Dreams Interpreted (1901) and Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (translated by A. A. Brill, 1913). Each quote on this page is checked word for word against the source text before the page is served, the same check the Dreamlore app runs on every quote it shows.
Other common dreams
Dream about teeth falling outDream about snakesDream about being chasedDream about fallingDream about flyingDream about water or drowningDream about deathDream about being pregnantDream about spidersDream about a houseDream about a carDream about fireDream about a babyDream about your partner cheatingDream about a weddingDream about school or examsDream about a tornado or stormDream about a dogDream about being nakedDream about hair falling outDream about moneyDream about ghostsDream about rats and miceDream about your ex
Dreamlore and these pages are for reflection and curiosity. The books quoted here are old — Miller wrote in 1901 and his entries read as omens, and many of Freud's ideas are disputed today. Take them as a starting point for thinking about your own dream, not as prediction or advice.