Dreaming Lens: Were you wearing the hat or was someone else? Was it a man’s hat or a woman’s hat? Was the hat related to keeping warm in the cold weather? Was the hat more for the purpose of adornment or fashion? Were you aware of to whom the hat belonged? Why did you have the hat and how did you feel about it?
Personal Focus: The head is the symbolic wellspring of our thoughts and ideas. Hats both adorn and protect the head. As such, a hat can represent specific ideas or thoughts themselves, but also the need or desire to contain them. In terms of adornment, a hat can be the outward expression of an inner idea. In the realm of protection, a hat can connect with keeping such ideas firmly in place.
Wearing someone else’s hat could indicate expressing the notion of trying on someone else’s ideas. If you can easily make an association between the hat in your dream and a person in your life, use the Character Aspect technique to inform your interpretation. The same would apply if someone in your dream was wearing the hat.
Style should be considered as well. A man wearing a woman’s hat may be considering a more flamboyant or expressive thought pattern. An old-fashioned hat might connect to an outdated modality of thought. Something very flashy could represent the creativity of your current way of thinking. How you feel about such a hat would indicate the level of risk associated with the choice to be expressive in such a way. Keep in mind the various ways in which hats have been in and out of fashion. The days of ubiquitous hat-wearing are considerably out of fashion. Ski caps used to be exclusively worn in winter, but are now part of the “gangsta” culture.
The motivation for wearing a hat may play a large part in a dream’s interpretation. A hat may be used to hide a loss of hair in which case the meaning takes on a new slant connecting with the authenticity (or lack thereof) of what you are presenting to the world. There are cultural considerations to examine as well: in some cultures, wearing a hat indoors would be considered rude while in others there are religious demands to keep the head covered at all times.