What Does It Mean to Dream of Maggots?

What Does It Mean to Dream of Maggots?

A dream of creepy, crawly maggots can be disturbing. As maggots are generally drawn to icky things, seeing them raises the larger question of what in the area is attracting them.

However, a maggot dream may serve a useful role in alerting you to what is decaying in your life and needs to go.

Maggot Dream Summary

Maggot Dream Symbolism

Maggots are known for their love of filthy things like spoiled food and rotting flesh. As spoiled food and rotting flesh typically provoke feelings of disgust, maggots are typically regarded with disgust as well. Your maggot dream can therefore symbolize that you find something in your life to be filthy or disgusting.

There is at times value in maggots liking the things no one else likes, as they can be intentionally used to treat serious wounds. In this context, a maggot dream could symbolize finding the right person to do a dirty but necessary job.

Common Maggot Dreams

  1. Dream about maggots in your hair
  2. Dream about maggots in your mouth
  3. Dream of maggots in your food
  4. Dream of maggots coming out of your foot
  5. Dream about maggots coming out of skin
  6. Dream of maggots cleaning out a wound
  7. Dream of killing maggots
  8. Dream of maggots in your house

Maggot Dream Symbolism

Maggot Dream Symbolism

Filth

Maggots are found in filthy environments. They often co-star with roaches in the heinously dirty houses featured on Hoarding: Buried Alive, so maggot dream symbolism overlaps with roach dream symbolism in this sense.

Dreaming of filth including maggots may symbolize that there is something physically or psychologically dirty in your environment. Whether your problems began with material clutter or with an emotional disturbance, these phenomena can reinforce each other in a vicious cycle.

Your maggot dream could therefore symbolize that you feel like your life has gotten totally out of control. Even if you can see that you contributed to the start of the problem in some way, you might also feel attacked, like others are piling onto your misfortunes and kicking you when you are down.

Disgust

Dreaming of maggots may symbolize that you are disgusted with someone or something in your life. What the maggots are attracted to in your dream could suggest the focus of your disgust.

Just the thought of maggots can be stomach-turning. If you vomit in your dream of maggots, this could show that you are trying to rid yourself of whatever you find disgusting in your life, as noted in vomiting dream symbolism.

Decay

Maggots are often attracted to dead things, and they are an active part of the process of how dead things decay. A maggot dream could therefore symbolize that something in your life is dead to the point of decaying.

A dead thing that you can see is attracting maggots, however, is typically a dead thing that has not been properly acknowledged as dead and respectfully buried. Dreaming of maggots could therefore symbolize that you are unwilling to let go of something in your life even though it is already dead. Your desire to keep it will not succeed in bringing it back and will only cause additional problems.

Common Maggot Dreams

Dream about maggots in your hair

Dream about maggots in your hair

Hair can be a symbol of sexual attractiveness. Dreaming of maggots in your hair could therefore symbolize a situation where you feel guilty about being sexually attractive to others. You might feel disgusted with others who are looking at you and also disgusted with yourself for letting them look at you.

Dream about maggots in your mouth

Dream about maggots in your mouth

If you dreamed about maggots in your mouth, how did they get there? If they came from within you, this could symbolize that you feel like you are rotting from the inside in some way. It might be a situation where you are disgusted with something you have done, even if this part of your life is not known to others.

If the maggots got in your mouth after you took a bite of contaminated food without realizing that it was contaminated, this could symbolize that you need to be more careful about what you allow into your life. You might be letting things go on autopilot when you really need to be watching them more closely.

Dream of maggots in your food

Dream of maggots in your food

If you dream that you find maggots in food you had intended to eat, finding them before you eat them is at least a positive sign that you can avoid the worst of some threat in your life. You may, however, need to look at how the threat got a foothold in the first place.

Maggots often get into food after the food is spoiled. Food can spoil from improper storage or simply from being kept too long.

Dreaming of maggots in your food could therefore symbolize that you are not taking care of your resources in the way that they need to be maintained. A dream of maggots in your food could also symbolize that you are hoarding more resources than you are able to use, and that this is not serving you or anyone else.

Dream of maggots coming out of your foot

Your feet symbolize your ability to stay grounded in reality and move forward in the world. Dreaming of maggots coming out of your foot could therefore symbolize that your foundation is shaky. You may have a plan for what you want to do with your life, but something about the structure is not sound.

Dream about maggots coming out of skin

Dreaming of maggots coming out of your skin could symbolize that whatever is hidden in your life might emerge, whether you want it to or not. Though this may be very uncomfortable in the moment when it happens, you could feel relieved in the long run to have a difficult burden you were carrying privately become known to others.

A dream of maggots coming out of your skin could also refer to a more internal process where you become aware of something that has been holding you back, even if you don’t share this knowledge with others. Either way, the maggots are probably better out than in, even if the discovery is disturbing.

Dream of maggots cleaning out a wound

Dream of maggots cleaning out a wound

Maggots can actually be intentionally used to clean wounds, as reported in The Atlantic. Versions of this practice have been around for a long time, but it is being rediscovered now that there is more awareness of the limits of what today’s antibiotics are able to accomplish.

Dreaming of maggots cleaning out a wound could therefore symbolize a situation where you are trying to figure out who is the best person to do a tough job. The answer might turn out to be someone who has a rough reputation. Even if they are not who you would choose to socialize with for a refined and pleasant evening, it may take a person who is a little bit dirty in some way to get a dirty job done.

Dream of killing maggots

Dream of killing maggots

A dream of killing maggots, like any other dream of killing, can show that you take a decisive approach to solving your problems. It can also show that you are proactively confronting a challenge while it is still small. Maggots are the larvae of flies, so it is probably easier to kill them before they grow wings and are able to fly away from you.

When you take decisive action to solve your problems with other humans, though, you may need to keep their humanity in mind. A dream of killing maggots could in some cases symbolize that you see your adversaries as less than human.

Dream of maggots in your house

Dream of maggots in your house

If you dream of having maggots in your house, the first question would be to ask whether you do have maggots in your house, as dreams can certainly be informed by your waking life surroundings. If you have lived in a house with maggots for a long time, having a dream that emphasizes this could symbolize that you are getting ready to finally take action to solve the problem.

If you know you don’t have maggots in your house in waking life, a dream of your house being infested by maggots could symbolize that there is something else in your home or family life that is troubling you. Whatever it is may not be as physically visible as a cluster of maggots, and that could make it harder for you to get others to take seriously that there is a problem needing to be addressed.

Given maggots’ attraction to decaying tissue, a dream of maggots in your house could symbolize that an old family conflict from a long time ago was never properly dealt with and is still causing trouble.

Conclusion

Though maggots can be disturbing to look at, they have their role in nature. Your dream of maggots can therefore shed light on the more challenging parts of your own life’s ecosystem.