Dreaming about a caterpillar: meaning, variations and what science says

Dreaming about a caterpillar: the direct answer

Dream interpretation is not prediction and not diagnosis. This article separates what sleep research observes from what popular interpretation associates with the theme.

Dreaming about a caterpillar is not a sign of illness, a pest at home, envy or the evil eye. The scene usually reflects what you saw or felt: an attacked vegetable garden, a taturana burn in childhood, a conversation about change. For many people, the caterpillar also carries the idea of slow transformation, of something that has not finished becoming what it will be.

Read also: Dreaming about a butterfly and Dreaming about a plantation or vegetable garden.

Where the dream caterpillar comes from

The continuity hypothesis, reviewed by Schredl and Hofmann in 2003, shows that dreams take up activities and worries of waking life. Someone who tends a garden, found caterpillars on the leaves of the lemon tree or helped a child with a school project on metamorphosis has plenty of material for this dream.

The body contributes too. In a classic 1958 study, William Dement and Edward Wolpert showed that stimuli applied during sleep, such as drops of water on the skin, could enter the plot of the dream. An itch or the brush of a blanket on the arm can turn, at night, into a caterpillar walking on the skin.

Sources: Schredl and Hofmann, Continuity between waking activities and dream activities, Consciousness and Cognition, 2003; Dement and Wolpert, Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1958.

Variations of dreaming about a caterpillar and what they usually go with

If the cocoon opened and what remained was the butterfly, continue with dreaming about a butterfly.

If the dream keeps coming back: when to seek help

Most of the time, a dream about a caterpillar passes with the day. If the sensation of bugs crawling on your skin returns night after night, disturbs your rest or continues after you wake, talk to a health professional. Repeated nightmares also have treatment: see how to have fewer nightmares.

Source: Morgenthaler et al., Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, 2018.

Freud, Jung and faith on this dream

In Freud's psychoanalysis. In The Interpretation of Dreams, a patient dreams of beetles trapped in a box. In associating, she recalls that her daughter, years before, kept caterpillars to watch them turn into chrysalises, and they starved to death; the same girl, once cruel to insects, had become very kind. From there the patient began to think about the distance between appearance and character. The example shows Freud's method: the caterpillar had no fixed meaning, it gained meaning from the memories it pulled up.

In Jung's psychology. In describing the negative animus, the book speaks of a kind of "cocoon" of thoughts and judgments about how things "should be", which cuts a woman off from the reality of life. In the Jungian key, the caterpillar can be read as a stage in a larger process, individuation, in which no one becomes ready all at once.

In the Dictionary of Symbols. Chevalier and Gheerbrant record the prejudice against the caterpillar, tied to the larva and to crawling creatures, but recall that the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad makes it a symbol of transmigration: it passes from one leaf to another as life passes from one body to another. Among the Baluba and Lulua of Kasai, in central Africa, a man is a small caterpillar in childhood, a large caterpillar in maturity, a chrysalis in old age, and the soul leaves the tomb as a butterfly.

Putting the two readings together. Science shows where the image comes from; the myths show why it moves us so much.

Sources: Freud, Die Traumdeutung, 1900; Jung (ed.), Man and His Symbols; Chevalier and Gheerbrant, A Dictionary of Symbols.

What dream dictionaries record

In O Livro dos Sonhos (a Brazilian dream book), L. P. Baçan gives the caterpillar a reading very different from the disgust it usually provokes: in life, news; in love, marriage or engagement.

Man and His Symbols, edited by Jung, warns against this kind of table: dreams are completely individual phenomena, and their symbols cannot be cataloged. The taturana that burned someone's leg on a farm years ago does not weigh the same for someone who only saw caterpillars in a science book.

Sources: Jung (ed.), Man and His Symbols; L. P. Baçan, O Livro dos Sonhos, 2014.

What folk tradition links to this dream

In popular reading, the caterpillar usually represents a phase of preparation and gradual change. The green one appears as growth; the black or dark one, as a worry that bothers; the colorful one, as novelty; and the fire one, as a warning to be careful with something that can hurt. Many caterpillars in a plantation are read as small accumulated problems. These are cultural interpretations, not predictions. See dream meanings according to science and culture.