What it usually means
Love fills dreams in many forms: romantic love, love for children and parents, friendship, love for places and work. Dreams about love usually concern connection and longing — what you have, what you miss, and what you hope to find in another person.
Connection is the first theme. Dreams of being loved, held or cherished often reflect real closeness, or a need for more of it. They can leave a warm feeling that lasts all day.
Longing is the second. Many love dreams are about someone absent: a former partner, a person who has died, someone unattainable. Such dreams can reflect grief, hope or unfinished feeling.
Self-worth is the third. Being loved in a dream can reflect your sense of being worth loving. Rejection in a dream can reflect self-doubt rather than a prediction about any real person.
Wholeness is another meaning. Falling in love with a stranger in a dream often has less to do with any real person than with a quality you are drawn to — tenderness, courage, freedom — that you are beginning to need in your own life.
Care is a quieter theme. Love also means looking after others. Dreams of protecting, feeding or comforting someone often reflect love in its practical, everyday form.
Family love is a related theme. Dreams of parents, grandparents, brothers and sisters often carry the oldest forms of love we know, with all their warmth and complications.
Worth saying plainly: dreaming of loving someone other than your partner is extremely common and does not mean you want to leave. Dreams explore feelings freely, without the loyalties of waking life.
What changes the meaning
Falling in love. New energy; attraction to a quality or a person.
Unrequited love. Longing; self-doubt; unmet needs.
Love for a stranger. A new part of yourself you are drawn to.
Love for a former partner. Unfinished feelings; or memories of a past self.
Being loved deeply. Security; self-acceptance.
Losing a loved one. Fear of loss; or grief.
Loving someone you dislike awake. Reconciliation; a hidden quality in them or you.
Love for a celebrity. Admiration of qualities you want.
Love at first sight. Sudden recognition; an intuition.
A love letter. Feelings wanting to be expressed.
Declaring love. Courage; openness.
Being rejected. Fear of rejection; vulnerability.
When it keeps coming back
Recurring love dreams often appear during loneliness, new relationships, breakups and long separations.
They also come when a person is learning to love themselves, and the dream practises the feeling first.
If you keep dreaming of the same person, notice what quality they carry in the dream. It often points to something you are looking for, not only in them.
Others dream of a love they have never had. Such dreams can show what they need and help them recognise it when it comes.
Some people dream of love long after a relationship has ended. Such dreams often soften with time as the feeling finds its place.
In Jungian terms
In Plato's *Symposium*, the comic poet Aristophanes tells a strange myth. Human beings, he says, were once round, with four arms, four legs and two faces. They grew so powerful that Zeus cut each of them in two. Ever since, each half has been searching for its other half, and love is the name for that longing to be whole again.
Jungian readers see in the myth a picture of how love can carry a longing for wholeness that no single person can fully satisfy — the missing half is partly within.
A love dream may be about both. The person you long for, and the part of yourself they help you find.