If you experience the nightmare of being buried alive, do you feel that others are suffocating your individuality in waking life and there is no way out? If in your dream you suspect that someone has deliberately buried you alive, your unconscious may be trying to alert you to hidden hostility from that person towards you in waking life.
If you managed to escape, try to remember whether you stumbled across anything significant; this may hold the key to transforming your situation so you can step out of the darkness into daylight in waking life. To come up out of the earth or a grave suggests some kind of rebirth, new insights or a new period of your life. Being in a tunnel, cave, chamber or mine shows you exploring what is usually beneath the surface of your mind, such as unacknowledged insights or feelings. This is a journey into your unconscious. Remember the rules here are different to those in everyday life. Here you create your own environment, your own traps and freedom out of your own fears, hopes and desires.
If the dream hole was of your own making in the dream, what was its purpose? Freudians equate holes in dreams with vaginas, so—if you are a man— your dream may have been imbued with sexual innuendo. Whatever your sex, because the vagina leads to the womb it may be that you long to shut yourself away, or withdraw for a while from the unpleasantness of your waking life. On the other hand, your dream may be highlighting those of your ‘underground’ tastes or secret longings that are unexpressed in real life. There is another explanation for dreams about burrowing underground or entering tunnels and caverns. The tunnel is a symbol of transition and the bowels of the earth a symbol of the unconscious, so your dream may denote your search for some kind of transformation. What you saw or heard in the cavern or tunnel is therefore significant.
If you saw light or made your way to the end of the tunnel in your dream, the implication is that you will find the inspiration you need in waking life. [1]