What does kissing mean in a dream?

Kissing in a dream resists any single meaning — the image is too old, too bodily, and too multiply charged for that. What it carries depends on who is kissed, how the kiss lands in the body of the dream, and what the dreamer's waking life has been doing with closeness, desire, and the hunger to be met.

The oldest layer of the image is pneumatic. Onians documents how the Greeks understood the kiss as a transfer of breath — animus, the stuff of mind and consciousness, passed mouth to mouth. The dying exhaled their spiritus and the living received it; Bion's Kypris asks for a kiss from Adonis "until from your soul your breath flow into my mouth and into my liver." The liver, in this archaic physiology, was the seat of desire and longing — eros literally reached the liver. A kiss in this register is not sentiment; it is the transmission of a living substance, a soul-event.

The breath of desire is Eros. Inescapable as the environment itself, with his wings he moves love in and out of all creatures at will. The individual's total vulnerability to erotic influence is symbolized by those wings with their multisensual power to permeate and take control of a lover at any moment.

Carson is reading archaic Greek poetry, but the image holds for the dream: a kiss in a dream is a site where the boundary between self and other becomes permeable, where something passes. The question is always what passes, and in which direction.

Jung's framework for the transference gives one clinical reading. When the kiss appears in a dream involving the analyst or a figure of authority, it often carries the projection of the parental imago — the longing to be recognized, held, received by someone who has the power to confer reality. Jung (1954) notes that projections onto the analyst "persist with all their original intensity," recapitulating the earliest bonds. A dream-kiss in this context is less about the person kissed than about the soul's hunger for a particular quality of contact — what the ratio of the mother names: if I am loved enough, I will not suffer. The kiss enacts that logic in the most condensed possible image.

But the kiss also carries the coniunctio — the union of opposites that alchemy made its central symbol. Edinger (1985) reads the coniunctio as the psyche's attempt to bring together what has been split: Sol and Luna, masculine and feminine, conscious and unconscious. A kiss between figures who carry these opposed charges in a dream is not merely erotic; it is the soul staging its own attempt at wholeness. The image of Zeus and Hera in the Iliad — the earth flowering spontaneously beneath them, the golden clouds concealing the pair — is precisely this: the sacred marriage as cosmological event, the world reconstituting itself around the union of opposites.

The shadow of the kiss is equally important. Jung (1954) observes that the coniunctio in alchemy is followed by the nigredo — the blackening, the death. The union produces something, but what it produces first is dissolution. A kiss in a dream that carries dread, or that involves a figure who should not be kissed (a sibling, a parent, the dead), is not simply wish-fulfillment in Freud's sense. It is the soul pressing against the incest barrier — which is to say, against the boundary that keeps the psyche from collapsing back into an undifferentiated state. Signell notes that the incest taboo in dreams often signals not perversion but the loss of erotic charge between figures who have become too merged, too familiar, too much like brother and sister. The dream's prohibition is the soul's attempt to restore the necessary gap — the space across which desire can actually move.

The dream-ego's experience of the kiss matters as much as its symbolic content. Hall (1983) insists on the distinction between the dream-ego and the waking ego: what the dreamer feels in the moment of the kiss — the quality of the contact, whether it is received or refused, whether it opens something or closes it — is the primary datum. Amplification with mythological parallels comes second. The kiss that leaves the dreamer with a sense of transmission, of having received something real, points in a different direction than the kiss that produces shame, or the kiss that is withheld at the last moment.

  • coniunctio — the union of opposites as the central symbol of alchemical and depth-psychological transformation
  • eros-psychopompos — Eros as guide of the soul downward, torch inverted
  • dream — the autonomous psyche's speech in its own register
  • James Hillman — archetypal psychology's reading of the dream as underworld visitation

Sources Cited

  • Carson, Anne, 1986, Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay
  • Onians, R.B., 1988, The Origins of European Thought about the Body, the Mind
  • Jung, C.G., 1954, Collected Works Volume 16: The Practice of Psychotherapy
  • Edinger, Edward F., 1985, Anatomy of the Psyche: Alchemical Symbolism in Psychotherapy
  • Hall, James A., 1983, Jungian Dream Interpretation: A Handbook of Theory and Practice