Dreams of defeat typically come at times where you feel overwhelmingly confident in your own abilities. The dreamer’s ego has grown to a point where it can no longer negotiate the part of their personality that detects the vulnerability inherent at all times, even when you are successful. Defeat in a dream symbolizes your life work – or an endeavor that aligns with your “self” – coming to an inevitable culmination and feeling overwhelmed by an experience far too large for you to handle without thinking that there is power within any individual person.
In many instances, these dreams give insight into one’s ability to manage oneself when striving for success. This is not limited only by physical goals but spiritual ones as well.
In a dream, defeat may refer to psychological losses that cannot be recovered, such as feeling vulnerable or being wrong. This concept then can translate into a sense of lacking the appropriate skills for a given task.
It is not uncommon for people to have a fear of defeat. This is natural, because being vulnerable means you are more at risk for negative outcomes than if you were confident and prepared. If we face our fears, we will find success and freedom from enduring the negative experience of feeling as though something is always defiling us from within–something that always occurs every time we relax but also succumb to our deepest fears when we don’t feel safe in this sense, in this state of vulnerability.