Someone’s at the door. It’s the middle of the night; this can’t be right. You’re trying to hold the door shut, but what’s on the other side is strong. You try to call for help, but maybe they don’t hear you or won’t be able to get to you in time. You sense something behind you. Is an intruder already inside your house?

There are are countless variations on this theme, in dreams.  What’s going on when you dream of an intruder? As with any dream, you want to start by considering your feelings. You may have been  terrified inside the dream, but  if you wake calm and detached, that may be  telling you that the issue isn’t urgent, and may not even be your own issue (we dream into the perspectives and situations of others). On the other hand, if you have a continued sense of fear or anxiety, you’ll want to waste no time in taking a cold hard look through the peep hole this dream has given you to learn what is trying to come in to your space.

You want to get the details of the dream as clear as possible. To do that, you may need to practice getting you head back inside the dream, visualizing yourself back in the scene, gathering all the information you can. Can you identify the intruder? Are there any clues to when this might be taking place?

The essential question to ask about a dream of an intruder is: what is threatening to invade your space? That could be a literal intruder, so the dream could be an advisory to look to home security, even if you live in a normally safe environment. The dream intruder could be a disease trying to break into the body. Or it could be a messenger or ally you have been failing to hear or to recognize – perhaps even a power of healing you have not been making room for in you life.

The little self, the ego self, is always terrified of being overwhelmed by the larger Self. To claim a relationship with greater powers we are required to brave up. D.H. Lawrence wrote of this, hauntingly, in his poem  “Song of a Man Who Came Through”:

What is the knocking?
What is the knocking at the door in the night?
It is somebody wants to do us harm.

 No, no, it is the three strange angels
Admit them. Admit them

As with any dream that presents a challenge, we want to develop the courage to reenter a dream of the unwanted visitor or intruder, see who that person really is, and then determine what we need to so.