Dreaming of Eating Bread: The Bible Gives It No Meaning

Scripture records no dream of eating bread, and gives no meaning to one. There is no verse to look up, and we will not invent a reading to fill the gap.

But of all the things to have dreamt about, dear friends, bread is the one Scripture will not stop talking about. It runs from a desert floor at dawn to a table at Emmaus, and the whole of the Gospel is somewhere inside it.

Does the Bible interpret dreams about bread?

Only once, and it is not encouraging. Pharaoh’s chief baker dreams of three baskets of bread on his head, with birds eating from the top one. Joseph tells him the three baskets are three days — and that the ending is death. That is the single bread dream in Scripture, and its meaning was given by God to a prisoner, for one man, on one occasion.

There is no pattern to extract. The Bible does not keep a dream dictionary, and the absence is deliberate: a key would make asking God unnecessary.

What does bread mean in the Bible?

Almost everything. Let us walk it quickly, because the sweep is the point.

It begins on the ground. A people newly out of slavery, hungry and complaining, wake to find something thin and white lying on the desert like frost, and they ask each other what it is — manna — and that question becomes its name. They gather it every morning for forty years. They cannot store it. Yesterday’s goes bad. God feeds them daily and refuses to be budgeted.

It continues in a prayer we say without hearing it: Give us today our daily bread. Today. Not this quarter. The oldest prayer of the Church asks for one day’s food, and asks for it together — us, not me.

And it arrives at a claim no one had made before. I am the bread of life. He says it to a crowd who had eaten from his hands the day before and come back wanting more of the same. He offers them something else.

The table at Emmaus

Here is where I would linger, if we have a moment.

Two people walk home on the evening of the resurrection, disappointed, explaining the week to a stranger who has fallen in beside them. He talks with them for hours. He opens the Scriptures. Nothing happens.

Then they sit down to eat, and he took bread, gave thanks, broke it and began to give it to them. Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him.

Not during the sermon. At supper. They knew him in the breaking of the bread — in a gesture so ordinary that they had watched him do it a hundred times without noticing, and so particular that it was the one thing they could not mistake.

Let us not miss what that means for us. God is most recognisable at the table. Not in the spectacular event we keep waiting for. In the meal, the hands, the thanks, the giving away.

So what about the dream?

We should not read it. But we might listen to what sits underneath it.

To dream of eating is often to be hungry for something, and hunger is not a fault to be corrected. Scripture treats it as the most reliable thing about us. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness — not those who have arranged not to need anything.

If the hunger is literal this morning, let us say so to God without embarrassment; he taught us the words. If it is the other kind — for meaning, for company, for some assurance we have not been given — that is the hunger the bread of life was offered to.

A blessing for the morning

May we have bread enough for today, and be content with today’s portion.

May we recognise him in the ordinary breaking of it.

And may we hand some on, because in Scripture bread is almost never eaten alone.

Related reading

• No One in the Bible Dreams About Eggs — but Jesus Talks About One
• Dreaming About Frogs: No Fixed Biblical Meaning
• Prayers for Gratitude