The Dream Book of Self-Knowledge

Stairs, staircase

  • stone, marble carved into a cliff: symbolizes a past attempt or past positive acts that have created the conditions for future ascent.
  • wooden: not an overly stable base for future progress.
  • descent by stairs: symbolizes the transition from the mind's content (thoughts, feelings) to acts; sometimes this image can symbolizes a path to the subconscious mind, i.e. to inner content that was unresolved and deferred to the subconscious; similar descents are frequent with people setting out on the path of self-awareness.
  • ascent by stairs: can express a person's actual ascent (not only in waking consciousness) and his attempt at realization; yet these dreams can also be very dangerous since the dreamer often forgets in them about the effort and discipline to which he had recently submitted himself, and succumbs to pride, which is a foretelling of an upcoming fall.
  • walking up and down stairs (or vice-versa): expresses an inconsistent person.
  • sitting on the stairs: the mind resting in peace, without trying to conquer, discover and explore is especially typical of those who "are dead to the world" and spiritual personifications in cases in which the dreamer, sitting on the stairs, admires the beauty of surrounding things without wanting to possess them; here the dreamer can discover truth and the power of intuitive understanding.
  • the number of stairs can play an important role in interpreting the dream: see Number.
  • cleaning: making the life journey easier.
  • to the sky or the heavens: a symbolic expression of the path to liberating the mind; access to this stairway is blocked by personifications of the Shadow archetype in particular; i.e. everything negative, everything that still has not been processed, understood and assimilated by a higher mind.
  • falling from stairs: see Fall.