What Do Dreams of Rats Mean?

Today you’re working from home. With a mountain of work to do, you’re determined to avoid any distractions. You log on, and immediately, the squeaking starts.

The high-pitched sound is coming out of a small gap under the stairs to the side of your desk. You try to crack on, but you’re soon disturbed again.

Using your smartphone as a torch, you crawl under the desk and shine it into the darkness. There’s something moving around and, on closer inspection, you almost jump out of your skin.

It’s a gigantic brown rat, busily gnawing away on an electricity cable.

Then boom! Sparks fly, the lights go out, and you’re left in the dark facing the rodent, who’s even more shocked than you.

You wake up. It was just a dream, but it was so vivid you’re left wondering what it could mean.

Rats can represent a real-world adversary who is intelligent and resilient to adversity, according to The Symbolism. Someone who could outwit you and represent an existential threat. The rat could also simply be a stand-in for something that makes you feel completely overwhelmed or outsmarted, as you would if you were being chased by a giant rat. When a rat steals food from you, it can indicate the need for survival, says Aunty Flo.

The spiritual meaning of rats is connected to the unexplored areas of yourself. Perhaps it’s time to challenge yourself with a new hobby or new job that you always wanted to try but never had the courage to. Rats that appear in your dreams are connected to your spirituality. To see rats gnawing signifies life goals related to your inner issues, says Aunty Flo. This leaves an important question. Will your inner issues be solved if you accomplish what you always wanted?

If you ever have a nightmare about a rat biting you, this is said to be an indication of someone close to you betraying you. This dream can signify negativity and may mean that someone might soon backstab you. This is a warning sign that you might need to be more careful about who you trust and share your secrets with.

According to Aunty Flo, seeing a dead rat in your dream could reveal you’re feeling overwhelmed or afraid about a situation in your real life. It may also indicate the end of a relationship, particularly one that involves betrayal. A dead rat can also signify that you have a fear that your secrets might be exposed or you’ll be caught for recent wrongdoing.

Rats have long suffered a bad rap, likely due to their portrayal in popular culture which has often been historically inaccurate and negative. Rats are seen as unclean, vicious parasitic animals that steal food and spread disease. However, a surprisingly large number of people keep rats as pets and find them to be tame, clean, intelligent, and playful.

Rodents, particularly rats and mice, feature heavily in literature, myth and legend. One of the best known and most historic tales about rats is “The Pied Piper of Hamelin”, in which a rat-catcher leads away an infestation with enchanted music. In books, the rat plays a villain in several mouse societies; from Brian Jacques’s Redwall to Robin Jarvis’s The Deptford Mice.

Their bad reputation hasn’t been helped by rats often being used as a mechanism in horror; representing evil in stories like James Herbert’s The Rats, H.P. Lovecraft’s The Rats in the Walls and in films like Ben. Another terrifying depiction of rats is as a method of torture, for instance in Room 101 in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Edgar Allan Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum.

The rat has a place in wider culture as the first of the twelve animals of the Chinese zodiac. It’s said that Buddha summoned all animals to him, but only 12 appeared. The first one was the rat, so he gave it the first year.

People born in 2023, 2011, 1999, 1987, 1950, and so on are expected to possess qualities associated with rats. These include intelligence, creativity, ambition, and a quick temper. People born in a ‘year of the rat’ are said to get along with “monkeys” but may not be able to interact well with “horses”.