Dream meaning Dreaming of stairs

Stairs in a dream turn rank and effort into architecture: going up toward a higher degree of standing, knowledge or responsibility, or going down toward what lies below. Direction matters, and so do the condition of the steps and the room you reach. Stairs are old images of degree and approach.

The Qur'an says God raises those who believe and those given knowledge by degrees, and the Prophet spoke of a hundred degrees in Paradise. Pilgrims climbing to Jerusalem sang the Psalms of Ascents, and the Persian kings had envoys from every nation carved along the great stairway of Persepolis, carrying their gifts upward. To the interpreters steps are degrees of rank, climbed or lost.

One common stair dream is the body's: the sudden jolt of missing a step as you fall asleep is a hypnic jerk, a harmless twitch of the drifting body, and it needs no reading.

Climbing stairs is rising in your affairs, in knowledge or in worship, step by step; descending to a basement is going down in standing, or into a hidden matter that has to be looked at; an attic is something stored away that will be needed again.

Endless stairs are an effort whose reward is delayed; broken or missing steps are a gap in the means that has to be repaired; a spiral staircase is a rise that comes by returning to the same matter at a higher degree. Being carried up an escalator is ease that comes with little effort, and falling down the stairs is a loss of standing to guard against.