This paper focuses on erotic dreams in early modern English culture. Its main suggestion is that descriptions and interpretations of erotic dreams until the seventeenth century operated on a symbolic rather than sexual level, i.e., erotic dream content was commonly seen as signifying something “outside” sex itself. In line with this observation, the paper tracks a general tendency for dreams to lose in epistemological prestige in the seventeenth century and increasingly emphasize the individual’s inner life rather than implications of angelic messages or predictions of the future. Arguably, the individual’s sexuality is at the focus of this change, foreshadowing in important ways later developments in e.g. Freudian psychoanalysis. Although thus providing a broad and general perspective on its topic, the paper offers more specific discussion of works of dream interpretation such as Thomas Hill’s The Most Pleasant Art of the Interpretation of Dreams (1576) as well as literary texts by Lyly and Spenser.