Headless dreams and their symbolic significance in your waking life

Dreaming of yourself or someone else having no head or of losing your head in a dream can be profoundly unsettling. While sometimes headless dreams are truly shocking, especially if occurring in a dream where you or someone is being attacked, you may be surprised to know that many times these dreams are not as horrific as they may seem at the outset. Despite the gore, fear and disgust you may expect from such a dream, for many, these dreams rarely invoke such feelings. This makes a lot of sense when you consider the symbolic meaning of the head and what its detachment from the body may represent.

Consider your overwhelming feeling in this dream. Was it one of shock?
Or did you have a lack of feelings?
Were you mortified? Or did the event seem disturbing in a more subtle way?

Our heads, being the seat of the brain, are often associated with intellect, logic and reason. The head is where we apportion the mental faculties. For many people, it is where their sense of consciousness resides. Therefore, to dream of a head being detached from a body can be a symbolic representation of a significant fracturing of the sense of unity within yourself. For some reason, an important part of you may be being repressed or denied and causing a deep feeling of things being ”not quite right” within you.

If the head is where we associate logic and thinking, then often the heart is where we associate emotions and feeling. Sometimes, too, the stomach can relate to basic appetites, instincts and “gut feelings”. The body in general is often a symbol of our more physical nature; our feeling, sensing, touching, moving self. If the head is associated with higher ideals, such as spirituality and learning, the body is then often considered with more earthly pursuits such as matters of survival and physical pleasure. If the brain and head help us to attain enlightenment, then the body keeps us grounded.

When the head is separated from the body in dreams, it can symbolise that your emotions are in some way cut off from your thinking, or vice versa. Consider if there is some area in your life where you have let your feelings take over and might benefit from taking the time to rationally consider things? You may have a sense that you are “losing your head”. It may happen when falling “head over heels” in love, or at the excitement of a new prospect such as a creative endeavour, business pursuit or investment.

This dream may serve as a caution to take a moment and reconnect your feelings with your mind. Do you need to proceed with more caution? Is there more information that could help you manage this situation better or inform your next steps? It is a wonderful thing to live in the moment and become caught up in the delight and excitement of emotions but, when to do so means you risk losing something important, it is wise to engage your logical mind as well.

The wonderful thing about dreams in this sense is that the advice is coming from within you. This is not a case of other people seeking to rain on your parade or take the joy out of present circumstances, this is your own inner mind flagging that you are not quite balanced at the moment and it may be prudent to align your heart and mind.

Alternatively, is there a situation that you have made a rational decision about but have denied your true feelings, and possibly deep down are now having doubts? Dreaming of a head being detached from a body can be a prompt to explore where your logical mind and deeper feelings may be in conflict. If in the dream, you associate more with the head that has become separated from its body, this could be an indication that you sense you are living too much “in your head” and possibly spending a disproportionate amount of your time engaging your thinking mind and not enough time in your body. This can happen if you feel cut off from your feelings — perhaps as a result of a relationship that is traumatic or unsatisfying, particularly if you have been hurt, abandoned or disappointed in the past.

These difficult relationships can just as often be with a family member such as a parent, sibling or child, as they can be with a spouse or significant other. You may have cut off your feelings as a means of self-protection or even survival, but to exist as a non-feeling human is not sustainable in the long term. Dreams of being a head separated from a body can arise from your deep subconscious urge for integration and to live as a full, authentic human again.

Sometimes the head-without-a-body dream may be less about feelings or trauma and relate more to the division between mind and body. If your profession involves a great deal of desk work, thinking or abstract concepts, or if you are studying, you may dream of being decapitated or have your head otherwise separated from your body. This can arise from the subconscious urge to become more physical. You may have neglected exercise or intimate experiences with your partner (or even have become separated from your partner). In this instance, your dream may be calling you to dance, swim, run, make love, get in the garden and get your hands dirty in the earth, build something or find your own way to live back inside your body again.
Thinking, reflecting, planning and dreaming are all important aspects to life, but we are physical human beings. We need to ground and centre ourselves sometimes as well. A dream of losing your head can be a call to rebalance and bring the joy of the body back into your lived experience.

Your dream may have been of someone else losing their head. This experience in a dream may produce quite different feelings than if you were losing your own head. You may feel shocked, horrified or relieved. You may even be the one who is decapitating another person. This may upset you more when you wake and recall the dream than the actual dream experience itself.

It is important to remember that other people in dreams are very often symbolic representations of parts of ourselves or of concepts or ideas. For example, you may dream of decapitating the boss of your organisation. Please rest assured this is not a disguised wish for violent intent! If you think of the idea of your boss being the head of the company, and that you beheaded him, this can symbolically work on many levels.

In its more literal aspect, you may feel that your boss is unsuitable for the role and should no longer be the head of the company — he/she (boss/head) should be removed from that position (body/company). However, if you examine the dream more deeply, you may find that your boss in the dream is also a symbol of power and authority. You may feel that your boss’s treatment of you recently has undermined your own sense of power and authority. The boss in the dream then is actually a part of you — your authority — and the decapitated boss may symbolise you feeling you have lost your authority.

To understand this dream more clearly, consider not only who is losing their head and who is doing the decapitating, but also look at the environment you are in. If your dream has a barren landscape, perhaps a desert or lots of ice or stagnant water, this can be an indication your dream is about feelings that are not expressed. Your dream may be encouraging you to open up about your feelings and to not try to control them so logically. If on the other hand, there are storms, floods or tidal wives, this is more likely a dream that is warning of strong emotions, perhaps so strong that are unsettling you, and the dream may be calling you to engage more reason in the situation.

Headless dreams can raise questions around where your emotions or logic may be disconnected. It could cause you to ask how your authority and personal power feel threatened, or how you can integrate your physical body with your thinking self.

On some occasions, dreams of decapitation can be deeply disturbing. You may even describe such a dream as a nightmare. The horror of the dream does not correspond to an increased relationship with actual physical violence, though it may be symbolic of a profound psychic harm. By this I mean if you have experienced, witnessed or caused (albeit intentionally or not) significant harm, your dreams may play out the themes of the associated feelings in a variety of ways in order for you to process, reconcile and, hopefully, ultimately heal. Often dreams of attacking someone and cutting off their head arise from disempowerment. If you feel stuck in a situation that seems intolerable, a decapitation dream can be a result of
a need to put a final end to it.

Dreams of removing someone’s head may be exploring feelings of vulnerability or where you feel threatened in life. If you feel someone is attacking your ideas, you may dream of a head coming off as symbolic of the loss of both the ideas and the authority to share them.

A dream of a headless body or of decapitation may be asking us where in our lives our emotions and logic are not in balance, and invite us to rejoin the areas of our lives that seem separate or disjointed.

Want to learn more about what your dreams mean? Visit our Dreams archive page.