I spent the night looking for my keys

✦ TODAY IN DREAM SIGNS

The thing you cannot find

Keys, phone, bag, the one door you cannot get through. One of the big ones, taken apart.

I HAD THIS ONE TOO

❧

🔑

❧

TODAY’S SYMBOL

Get the Guide

MONDAY, 21 SEPTEMBER

Dear friend,

I spent most of Saturday night looking for my keys in a building I have never worked in, and I did not find them.

I went through the same three rooms over and over, patting the coat I keep meaning to have mended, the one with the hole in the pocket, and getting crosser each time round.

It is a dull dream to describe and a horrible one to have, since nothing chases you and nothing happens, and you wake up tired out by an evening of looking.

Almost everybody gets this one at some point, so it belongs with the big ones, and it is worth more attention than it usually gets.

The looking

The dream is rarely interested in the thing itself, only in the looking, which is why you can search a whole building and never once picture what you would do if you found what you wanted.

🔑 My keys	📱 My phone
👜 A bag with everything in it	👥 A person I cannot find
Tap the one that fits

Losing something and hunting for it sits on the standard list of dream themes that turn up at least once in nearly everybody, alongside falling and being chased, so you are in ordinary company here.

It also repeats more than most. When one woman’s dreams were collected across a lifetime, losing an object came back so often that it was one of a handful of themes running through most of them.

Which suggests it is not about the keys, since nobody loses the same keys for forty years, and something else is doing the searching.

“	The dream is rarely interested in the thing itself, only in the looking.

What the object opens

Every one of these things is a way through to something else, since keys open a door, a phone reaches a person, and a bag carries the papers that let you be who you say you are.

People have read them that way for a very long time, which is folklore rather than evidence, though it is folklore that lines up with what the objects actually do all day.

So the useful question is not where the keys went, it is what you have been unable to get into lately, and whether you would go in if the door opened this afternoon.

✦ BEFORE YOU GET OUT OF BED

Tap one to answer it

1

What was I looking for?

2

What would it have opened?

3

Where did I keep looking?

4

Who was waiting for me?

5

What am I locked out of?

6

Would I go in if it opened?

The last one is the one worth sitting with, because a search you never finish is a very effective way of never arriving at the door.

The same three rooms

What gives this dream away is the repetition, since you go back through places you have already searched rather than opening anywhere new, which is a thing people do awake as well.

It comes in weeks where your attention is split across too many things, so nothing is lost exactly, only nothing is where you put it, and that includes you.

Mine came after a fortnight of telling you to ring people while I sat on an envelope, and I notice the keys turned up in no pocket at all.

✦ CARRY THESE WITH YOU TODAY

I know what I am looking for

I can stop searching the same room

I am allowed to ask for help finding it

The door is the point, not the key

Nothing important is actually lost

Tap the one you need

✦ WRITE BACK

In this dream you are either late for something or locked out of something, and I would like to know which one yours is.

TELL ME WHICH ONE

The coat is going to the menders this week, which will not fix the dream, though it will stop me patting the same pocket twice.

Sleep well,

Dream Signs

P.S. My daughter announced at breakfast that she had lost the torch, then found it in the bucket, where she had put it herself, and said that this happens to her constantly. Tell me what you are looking for. She is nine.

✦ TONIGHT’S PRACTICE

🔑

Give one thing a place

Before bed, pick the thing you hunt for most in waking life and give it one spot by the door. The dream borrows heavily from the hunting you do awake.

TELL ME WHAT YOU PUT DOWN

✦ MANIFESTATION TIP

🚪

Name the door, not the key

Say out loud what you want to get into rather than what you think you need first, because people spend years hunting for a key to a door they have never once named.

WHAT CAME BACK

Something happened after a dream? Tell me

More from Dream Signs

Quick Links

Subscription