The Dream Archive

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Search across 2,348 dream symbols drawn from the older dream books and the public archive. Each entry carries an original interpretive note for the contemporary dreamer.

From the Dream Archive
Handkerchiefs medallion
Handkerchiefs

Handkerchiefs

Handkerchiefs often touch flirtation and the fragile affairs of the heart — lost ones breaking engagements, white ones resisting flattery, waved ones bidding goodbye. The dream may ask where light romantic entanglements are stirring, whether you'll keep your conduct clean or let it soil, and what parting the cloth is signalling.

Miller 1901
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What the old dream-books say

These are the entries the historical dream-books record for handkerchiefs, in their own words. They are period voices, not predictions, and they do not always agree with one another.

Gustavus Hindman Miller, 1901

Ten Thousand Dreams Interpreted

To dream of handkerchiefs, denotes flirtations and contingent affairs.

To lose one, omens a broken engagement through no fault of yours.

To see torn ones, foretells that lovers' quarrels will reach such straits that reconciliation will be improbable if not impossible.

To see them soiled, foretells that you will be corrupted by indiscriminate associations.

To see pure white ones in large lots, foretells that you will resist the insistent flattery of unscrupulous and evil-minded persons, and thus gain entrance into high relations with love and matrimony.

To see them colored, denotes that while your engagements may not be strictly moral, you will manage them with such ingenuity that they will elude opprobrium.

If you see silk handkerchiefs, it denotes that your pleasing and magnetic personality will shed its radiating cheerfulness upon others, making for yourself a fortunate existence.

For a young woman to wave adieu or a recognition with her handkerchief, or see others doing this, denotes that she will soon make a questionable pleasure trip, or she may knowingly run the gauntlet of disgrace to secure some fancied pleasure.