Dreams about snow & ice: Jung, traditions and semiotics

This is not a dream dictionary. Each perspective below names where it comes from; traditions are shown side by side, not merged into one meaning.

Start with yourself

Was the snow fresh or old? Did it make a sound underfoot? Did the cold hurt, or wake you up?

Jung · Two levels of reading

There is no specific Jungian note for this image; this is his general method.

Jung suggested reading a dream image first on the “objective level” (the Snow & ice as the real thing in your life), then on the “subjective level” (the Snow & ice as a part of you). He also warned against fixed dream dictionaries: the same image means different things for different dreamers.

If the Snow & ice were a part of you, which part would it be?

C. G. Jung, Collected Works 7 & 8; “Approaching the Unconscious”, in Man and His Symbols (1964)

Traditions, side by side

Early dream research Dream research

Ellis gives cold from disturbed bed covers as a common bodily source of dreams, with the case of a sleeper who dreamed of being surrounded by snow on a mountain and woke tangled in the sheets, partly uncovered, on a cold night.

Havelock Ellis, The World of Dreams (1911), ch. IV, on tactile sensations

Chinese poetry Literature

Liu Zongyuan’s “River Snow” empties a whole landscape — no birds, no footprints — and leaves one old man fishing in the cold: snow as solitude.

Liu Zongyuan, “River Snow”

Japanese folklore Folk saying

In the Yuki-onna tale retold by Lafcadio Hearn, the snow woman is beautiful and deadly at once, and spares a young man on one condition.

Lafcadio Hearn, Kwaidan (1904), “Yuki-Onna”

Semiotics: how an image comes to mean

Following C. S. Peirce, an image can work as a sign in three ways:

Icon — by resemblance
Does the snow & ice look like one you have actually seen? Could it simply be a copy of a memory?
Index — by connection
Could the snow & ice point to an actual cause — a bodily sensation, a sound in the room, something that happened that day?
Symbol — by convention
Does the snow & ice mean what it means by convention — an idiom, a saying, a family phrase? Would it still mean that in another language or culture?

C. S. Peirce, Collected Papers 2.247–249 (icon, index, symbol)
C. G. Jung, Psychological Types (1921), “Definitions: Symbol” — a sign stands for something known, a symbol for something not yet fully known
Ellis (1911), ch. II, on verbal links between dream images

Exploration notes, not a diagnosis, a prediction, or evidence of real events.

Recorded dreams with snow & ice

A melon in winter, still in his hand Northern Wei China · c. 500 (Northern Wei)
Iron cavalry, silent as water Shu (Sichuan), China · c. 1173
Armoured horses on frozen rivers Shanyin (Shaoxing, Zhejiang), China · 4th day of the 11th lunar month, 1192
Never cross the large lake Great Lakes region · traditional (recorded c. 1820s–1850s)
Snow fell so no one could track them Great Lakes region · traditional (recorded c. 1820s–1850s)
Go back, your time has not yet come Great Lakes region · traditional (recorded c. 1820s–1850s)
An ice-cold little hand at the window Yorkshire moors, England · 1847 (novel)
Why is the babe weeping? Russia · 1880 (novel)
Snow at the top of the hotel England · before 1911