The general Biblical interpretation of an owl symbolizes the ability to see the truth. The biblical meaning of owls in dreams rests on the foundation of wisdom.
This is somewhat related to the Greek or Gentile symbolism behind this animal.
In Greek mythology, the owl is the spirit animal of the goddess of wisdom, Athena.
Matthew 5:14 relates something similar when it comes to the owl:
“Ye are the light of the world.”
Since owls have eyes that see in the dark, this indicates a special receptiveness to knowledge.
It means an ability to look beyond the obvious and to go beyond conventional wisdom.
This wisdom, of course, comes with responsibility.
It’s one thing to be able to read between the lines and truly figure out the truth.
It’s another to be so open-minded to let everything in, including lies.
There is some balance between inner wisdom, intuition, receptiveness to the world, and vigilance.
Native American folklore traditions have something similar to this definition.
Regardless, owls symbolize knowledge and intuitive ability.
Also, it indicates a person whose spirit animal is the owl has some sort of inner vision that can manifest in external reality.
What Does It Mean to Dream About an Owl?
When you dream of an owl, it indicates that there are certain hidden messages in your waking life.
These hidden messages are not Easter eggs that you see in a video game.
Instead, they are more important because the longer they persist and the longer you are ignorant of them, the longer you will struggle.
It really is that simple.
Jeremiah 33:3 says that it is He who reveals the profound and hidden things.
He knows what is in the darkness, and the light dwells with Him.
It is an exhortation to put God first because many people think they know the truth.
They feel they know how their lives are being lived and where they should be going.
But as a very powerful passage from Proverbs says:
“Trust in the LORD and lean not in your own understanding. He will direct your ways to what is right.”
Sometimes our pride gets in the way, and what we think is vision is actually just self-delusion.
Be aware that there are hidden messages in your life.
It’s a good sign that when you dream of an owl.
This means you are awakening to the reality that there are hidden messages you can only discern through a stronger relationship with God.
By putting God first and praying instead of automatically just giving in to what you think your experience is, you will be led to real virtue.
A lot of the mystery will lift.
What Does It Mean to See Owls in Dreams Sporadically?
The interpretation above is for people who see owls figure prominently in their dreams over an extended period of time.
On the other hand, if you occasionally see owls in your dreams, you should be on the lookout for hidden aspects of your life.
It may be a conversation in the future or a current conversation where you will run into hints if you choose to be aware.
These hints may have something to do with your identity, your family life, the way your life has been going, or your hopes and dreams.
Mark 4:22 (NLT) says:
“For everything that is hidden will eventually be brought into the open and every secret will be brought to light.”
The truth cannot be suppressed, but the truth can be delayed.
Know the difference.
The longer you keep your eyes closed or the longer you feel you can’t be bothered with discernment as far as the big things in your life go, the longer negative patterns or less-than-productive habits will persist.
If you want to gain the knowledge you didn’t have before, be on the lookout for such knowledge.
Don’t automatically assume.
Don’t think that just because things have been a certain way in the past, they will continue to be that same way long into the future.
Open yourself up to change.
Can Owls Symbolize Death?
If you dream of an owl, it can symbolize death in certain contexts.
By death, I’m not necessarily talking about physical death.
Instead, the death that an owl image can represent in your dreams may point to the end of a beginning.
Make no mistake.
A lot of people respond to the end of certain stages in their lives as no different from physical death.
You don’t want to let go.
You’re crying.
You’re torn up inside.
You feel naked and afraid.
It is no surprise, then, given this emotional mix, that a lot of people are quite apprehensive about change.
They probably already know that change is the only constant in life.
In the context of owls representing death, the only proper response is to accept it and embrace it because we often hang on to things we shouldn’t be hanging on to.
We are hanging on to things because they represent comfort and convenience.
But they are not necessarily good for us.
Just as it is painful for a butterfly to break out of a cocoon, it is also painful to let go of old, unproductive, or even counterproductive ways of thinking and living that have been holding you back for all these years.
At the moment, things that are going through a change in your life may appear as all bad news.
But in reality, they are simply old doors closing to make way for new doors opening.
Maybe what needs to happen for you to better live up to your potential is for you to lose your job or your significant other to walk out the door or for you to suffer some sort of health emergency.
This is a hard message for many people to wrap their heads around because these indicate some sort of discomfort and pain.
Who wants to go through all that?
But when you look back, many of your life’s breakthroughs only became possible because you were shaken loose from other arrangements and patterns that were actually holding you back.
What Does It Mean to Dream of an Owl Hunting?
Do you see an owl in your dream flying around in the night, obviously hunting for something?
This indicates that you have been suppressing your intuition.
In many cases, this can also indicate willful blindness.
Are you the type of person who is more than comfortable living with 800-lb elephants in the middle of a room?
If you see an owl that is obviously hunting and scoping out the territory below, maybe this dream image will bring about the necessary positive change in your life.
You may be about to go through a very personally challenging situation where you are forced to let go of your willful blindness.
For a variety of reasons, people just simply don’t want to deal with harsh realities in their lives.
They don’t want to look it straight in the eye and recognize it for what it truly is.
Are you or somebody you know an addict?
Are you or somebody you know persisting in a dead-end job that you don’t care about?
Are you or somebody you know thinking of returning to school but simply too demotivated to go through with it?
It doesn’t take much heavy thinking to figure out what you need to do.
After all, if you truly listen to yourself, much of this stuff has been eating away at you.
These are your 800-lb elephant in the room, but here you are, going about your life, pretending that there is no elephant in the room.
Sure, there are droppings.
There are big stop marks and other indicators of a giant pachyderm in the middle of your interior living space.
But you can’t be bothered!
For all intents and purposes, you have been blind.
It has warped your life, but it’s perfectly okay with you.
This is how you define normal.
Well, things are coming to a head.
As uncomfortable and possibly horrifying your near-term prospects may be when it comes to this giant issue in your life, it might actually be the breakthrough you’ve been secretly dreaming of.
If you’ve been dreaming of owls on the hunt, your subconscious is telling you that maybe you should make things easier on yourself.
Perhaps by at least acknowledging your situation and understanding what you’re doing, you would make the impact of the impending personal crash or breakdown more manageable.
Don’t get me wrong.
I’m not saying that the change that’s going to happen or should happen is going to be painless.
Let’s get that fantasy out of our heads.
It’s never going to be painless.
Because the moment you get used to doing things a certain way or thinking about certain issues of your life a particular way, it’s hard to go back.
We are, after all, creatures of comfort and habit.
We get used to doing and thinking about certain things a certain way.
So any changes to that will necessarily bring discomfort.
But if you use the omen of the hunting owl as your cue to give yourself permission to be open to change and to be emotionally ready, then you should be okay.
Things won’t be perfect.
Nobody can guarantee a perfect landing.
But it would be much better for you emotionally than otherwise.
What Does It Mean to Dream of an Owl in a Witchcraft Ritual?
The term “witchcraft” is very broad.
A lot of Christians have a black-and-white view of witchcraft.
Either things are lined up with the Bible, or it doesn’t.
And if it doesn’t, it’s witchcraft.
In this context, when you see an owl as a motif in a ceremony that you can’t fully describe or adequately understand in your dream, you’re looking straight at the process of intuition formation.
We like to take control of our lives by reducing our internal processes into equations as much as possible.
It’s easy to see why people do this.
When you have an equation, you only need to feed numbers into it, and you are assured of an outcome.
There is no guesswork.
There is no speculation.
All the heavy lifting has been done for you in that form of that equation.
You just need to plug in the numbers.
Wouldn’t it be awesome if there is such a thing as a life equation where all the things that confuse, trouble, or potentially make us paranoid could be put into this magic equation?
The good news is that the solution or the right answer will always come.
Most people wouldn’t have a problem with this.
But when you see an owl as part of a ritual that you cannot understand or fully describe, your subconscious tells you that you should respect your intuition.
You’re disrespecting yourself by trying to break it down and pinpoint why your intuitive decisions are often right.
You must understand that this comes from a deep, dark, and misty place deep within your core.
Instead of trying to slice and dice your intuition to come up with an equation that would then lead to mathematical certainty, it’s much better to go in a different direction.
It’s much better to be aware of your emotions at any given time.
Be aware of how your emotions influence your decision-making processes and how these line up with the values you think you have.
And finally (if all of the above weren’t enough), pay close attention to how you actually behave compared to how you mentally decide.
In reality, people make emotional decisions, and that’s why despite their “equation thinking,” which they confuse with rationality and logic, they keep making the same types of decisions.
Something triggers something in them, and they can be counted on to make the same call time and time again.
This is what you should be picking it.
This is what you should be analyzing.
This is what you should be afraid of: emotional thinking, not your intuition.
I can understand why people would try to pick apart their intuitive thinking abilities.
It’s all about predictability.
Who wouldn’t want a predictable equation?
But life doesn’t work that way! It’s much better to trust your intuition and have a rough understanding of what feeds into it, but ultimately it boils down to trust.
You need to pay more of your attention to the interconnection between your thought processes and your emotional reactions.
The more progress you make on that front, the more successful and effective of a person you’d be.
So when you see that image of the owl in some sort of ritual without the owl being sacrificed, let that be a sign for you to train your intellectual curiosity to unpack your emotional decision-making processes.
What Does It Mean to Dream of an Owl Staring at You?
Have you ever met somebody who looked at you like you weren’t there?
It’s as if their eyes are piercing your flesh and bone, and they can see the space behind you.
For a lot of people, this is a disconcerting experience.
For some men, it is even interpreted as some sort of challenge.
The fact that we are uncomfortable when we undergo such scrutiny is a sign of hope.
A lot of the times, it’s very easy to live your life like you’re on autopilot.
Most animals just need certain stimuli, and they can be counted on to act in a very predictable way.
But you’re not an animal!
You can make decisions.
You have free will.
You can turn the ideas and notions that may have been bouncing inside your head into things you can see, hear, touch, taste, and smell.
In other words, you can create your own reality based on stuff that ultimately is not that real.
Ideas are what animate reality because when people take action on ideas, it’s nothing short of magic.
What if I told you that the most beautiful buildings made of steel, glass, stone, and concrete all started as nothing?
That’s right!
Everything started as an idea.
They are just lines on an architect’s blueprint.
As the architect starts to flesh out his or her idea, other types of blueprints come into existence.
There’s the plumbing blueprint, the electrical system blueprint, and then the structural engineering blueprint.
From these seemingly random pile of paper comes big buildings made out of glass of very imposing height — buildings that take up a lot of space, buildings that provide a shelter and a future for people working in them.
These are buildings that you cannot deny.
You can see them a mile away.
You cannot intimidate them with your reasoning powers or emotional urgency.
They are real.
You can touch them.
You can enter them and take the elevator up.
They’re real!
I want to bring out this intersection between the “unreality” of ideas and the reality of their concrete manifestations because this is the best analogy to your life.
Have you been spending a lot of your time in the world of the unreal?
Maybe these are frustrated dreams and disappointed hopes.
Don’t for a second believe that just because you’ve been thinking about these things, you are somehow a failure or a disappointment.
Instead, focus on the process you must go through to turn these emotional images, hopes, wishes, dreams, and notions into reality.
Ultimately, your life is the building and you’re the architect.
Your hopes, fantasies, and wishes — these are the blueprints.
But as you focus more time and devote more energy to your “mental blueprints,” the more solid they become until they materialize into a plan.
I’m not talking about wishes and sentiments we mislabel as “plans.”
No!
These are real plans.
They are measurable, specific, time-bound, and can be sliced and diced into modular pieces.
They can be outsourced, delegated, or done in-house.
They also require accountability because when you look at a real plan, you can easily tell if it was not executed.
That is accountability.
There is no space for you to fool around when dealing with a real plan.
By investing more time into your ideas and letting yourself go through the process, your plan ultimately becomes a reality.
This is what an owl staring at you represents.
When you dream of that owl staring at you, it is really looking past you to pick apart and ultimately slice and dice your ability to interact with and ultimately control your personal reality.
What Does It Mean to Dream of an Owl Attacking You?
It’s safe to say that this is not a good sign.
When you see an owl attacking you, it is a subconscious realization that you are resistant to knowledge.
A lot of people, of course, will find that very insulting.
We all would like to imagine that we are receptive to knowledge and feedback and that we can take whatever input people have to offer and act on them.
Well, that’s how we think.
That is self-perception.
But as you probably already know, there’s often a big divide between how we see ourselves and how we truly behave.
When you see an owl in your dream attacking you, your subconscious mind is telling you that you need to be more open.
You need to step out of your delusion and understand that there is a larger world out there that spins on its own axis.
It has its own reality.
It’s never going to go away.
The more you pretend that the only world that matters is the one that you made up in your mind, the harder the eventual crash you will experience.
Reality exists!
Denying gravity will not spare you from being reduced into a thin, red paste when you jump off that building.
Understand the power of your subconscious mind.
Stop using it to protect your emotions.
Stop using it for defensiveness.
Stop abusing it to feed some sort of counterproductive fantasy.
Instead, use it to deal with reality.
That’s right!
Live in the world as it is, not based on how you wish it would be.
What Does It Mean to Dream of a Flock of Owls Attacking You?
Again, any type of own attack is not a good sign.
What is particularly troubling about a group owl attack is that sense of betrayal you feel.
For the longest time, you have convinced some people to think about certain personal issues a certain way.
Maybe you broke up with an ex- and you’ve convinced everybody that the breakup was the fault of your ex-.
Well, it turns out that people’s impressions of your breakup have changed quite a bit thanks to a social media post or somebody saying something.
That one missing piece of information has changed people’s minds.
Instead of being the victim that you portrayed yourself to be, it turns out that you’re a monster.
Now, this is an opinion.
Everybody is entitled to one.
But this doesn’t take away from the fact that you’ve been spending all this time trying to convince people to think a certain way.
You’re not prepared for the time when their logical, mental, and reasoning processes kick into place and process facts normally.
When the lying stops or when the lies crumble from their own weight, people can and will turn against you.
This is especially true if they feel you have been somehow actively shielding them from a piece of information that would’ve helped them make a better-informed decision.
It’s a mess!
The solution to this is to not do it at all.
Please understand that a lie remains a lie regardless of how many people believe in it.
All you’re doing is transforming a personal tragedy of an individual lying to himself or herself into a group tragedy.
As sad and pathetic as that situation may be, it doesn’t turn a lie into the truth.
What Does It Mean to Dream of an Owl Flying?
Now, this is very different from an owl patrolling for food.
Instead, you see an owl flying.
This can indicate that something good is already happening in your life.
Your subconscious may be picking up signals, and it is now able to connect the dots.
It can see that good things are happening, and the manifestation of these positive events will become even more pronounced as time goes by.
This can also indicate that there is some sort of financial breakthrough in the works for you.
Now, don’t get too excited.
It may not mean that you become an overnight millionaire.
But you can rest easier when it comes to your tight finances because there will be some sort of breakthrough.
What Does It Mean to Dream of a White Owl?
The Biblical and spiritual meaning of a white owl indicates purity in the form of death.
If you’re looking for real peace in this world, you don’t have to look far.
Death brings peace because, as the book of Ecclesiastes plainly states, “the dead know nothing.”
Your mind is no longer working.
You’re no longer conscious.
You have, for all intents and purposes, fallen into sleep.
That is peace.
The problem is that we fear death more than it should be feared.
In fact, if you look at death and what it truly represents, there’s nothing to be afraid of.
It’s the end.
Death may be the end of life, but it is the beginning of peace.
Psalm 55:4 (NIV):
“My heart is in anguish within me; the terrors of death have fallen on me.”
When you dream of white owls, you are confronted with your fear of death.
But please understand that there’s a big difference between fear of death and death itself, just as there’s a difference between the love of money (which is bad) and money itself.
Money itself is just a tool for signifying value.
It is an instrument that symbolizes to the world the transfer of one value from one person to another.
Pay careful attention to what you fear because, in the end, your fear prevents you from growing.
Other Meanings of Owls in Dreams
Depending on the context of the owl image in your dream, it can indicate the following.
Patience
You may need patience to increase more of what you already have, or you might need to acquire the ability to be patient.
Whatever the case may be, your subconscious is trying to let you know that there will be a period when your patience will grow.
This indicates challenging and often frustrating processes.
This is not a fluke.
It is not the hardship that is the issue.
The issue is whether you will let the challenge wake up the virtue of patience inside you or further strengthen it.
Mysticism
The owl can also indicate an awakening interest in mysticism.
Mysticism is often shrouded in the veil of ignorance, irrationality, or superstition.
That’s too bad!
While we do live in a material world, we cannot afford to ignore the power of the spiritual aspect of reality.
For every item you can see, you best believe there is a process you cannot see.
This is where mysticism can come in handy.
When you see owls in your dreams repeatedly in a wide range of contexts, at the very least, this indicates that you should be more in touch with the side of you that recognizes and understands a little bit about mysticism.
Protection
Owls can also represent protection.
A little bit of wisdom can go a long way in protecting yourself and your loved ones.
Seeing owls in your dreams can indicate that you need to level up your ability to protect yourself through better awareness.
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Dream interpretation and symbology have fascinated me ever since I read Freud’s classic, “The Interpretation of Dreams.” Ever since, I have explored Christian, Jewish, Hindu, and Buddhist as well as Jungian psychological ideas about the meaning of dreams. Thanks for joining me in my exploration of the amazing intersection between our conscious waking world and the rich expanse of our subconscious-the home of our intuition, instincts, and hidden potential.