Dream and Psychological Tarot Decks
There are decks that read the world around you and then there are decks that read the one underneath it.
A psychological tarot deck treats the cards as a map of the inner life rather than a forecast of the outer one. The archetypes do the work that Jung described them doing: they give a shape to material you have not yet found words for.
Dream decks come at the same territory from the other side, through imagery that behaves the way dreams behave. Symbols that will not resolve neatly, figures who are and are not you, scenes assembled from things that could not stand together in daylight.
We would not generally recommend these as first decks. They ask something of a reader who already trusts their own intuition and their imagery departs from the Rider-Waite-Smith symbolism most tarot books teach.
Our dream and psychological decks and why
Nicolas Bruno did not illustrate these 78 cards, he staged and photographed them, drawing on years of living with sleep paralysis and the dream journals he kept through it.
A psychological tarot built on dreams, Jungian archetypes and the language of the unconscious, with a 228-page companion book, which is the longest of any deck we stock.
Built on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life and Golden Dawn concepts, with a 140-page companion book. By the same creators as Liber Somnia and the more structured of the two.
How to choose between them
- What is a psychological tarot deck?
- A deck that treats the cards as a map of the inner life rather than a prediction of events. The imagery is chosen to surface material about yourself, often through archetypes in the sense Carl Jung described.
- Which tarot deck is best for dream work?
- The Somnia Tarot by Nicolas Bruno, a 78-card photographic deck staged from his own dream journals and years of living with sleep paralysis.
- Are dream and psychological tarot decks suitable for beginners?
- Generally not as a first deck. Their imagery departs from the Rider-Waite-Smith symbolism that most tarot books and courses teach, so a beginner would be learning the deck and the tradition at the same time.
Worth reading alongside these: our review of The Somnia Tarot. Looking for something else? tarot decks for beginners, shadow work and dark tarot decks, indie oracle decks. Or see the full collection of indie tarot decks, every one of them stocked and shipped from the UK.