Dreams about storm: 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 storm far off or already on top of you? Were you looking for shelter, or standing in it watching?
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 Storm as the real thing in your life), then on the “subjective level” (the Storm as a part of you). He also warned against fixed dream dictionaries: the same image means different things for different dreamers.
If the Storm 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
English drama Literature
The Tempest opens with a storm raised by magic, and Prospero later says: “We are such stuff / As dreams are made on.”
Shakespeare, The Tempest, IV.i
Early dream research Dream research
Ellis recorded his own dream of a cyclone threatening the house, and connected it to the wind outside that night.
Havelock Ellis, The World of Dreams (1911), ch. IV
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 storm look like one you have actually seen? Could it simply be a copy of a memory? - Index — by connection
Could the storm point to an actual cause — a bodily sensation, a sound in the room, something that happened that day? - Symbol — by convention
Does the storm mean what it means by convention — an idiom, a saying, a family phrase? Would it still mean that in another language or culture?
An example
Chinese poetry Literature
Lu You, old and bedridden, hears wind and rain at night, and “armoured horses on frozen rivers enter my dream”. The sound points to the dream like an index; the war is what his longing made of it.
Lu You, “Great Wind and Rain on the Fourth Day of the Eleventh Month” (1192)
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 storm
- A friend at the bedside, like a breath of wind Scheria (setting) · c. 8th century BCE
- Seven thin ears devoured the full Egypt (narrative setting) · undated narrative
- A thunderbolt fell on my father’s house Mesopotamia · 401 BCE
- Throwing thunderbolts upon Sparta Sparta, Greece · 272 BCE
- Meeting a god by the great marsh Pei (Xuzhou), China · c. 257 BCE (as told)
- Four great beasts from the sea Babylon · narrative set c. 6th c. BCE
- A goddess put lightning in my hand Near Rome, Italy · 88 BCE
- Into the ants’ nest: the Hall of Watching Rain Xiayang, Shaanxi, China · undated (Jin collection)
- My late husband came back to mend the house Pengcheng (Xuzhou), China · 5th century
- Armoured horses on frozen rivers Shanyin (Shaoxing, Zhejiang), China · 4th day of the 11th lunar month, 1192
- An ice-cold little hand at the window Yorkshire moors, England · 1847 (novel)
- Stair after stair in endless series Edinburgh, Scotland · c. 1867–1871
- A sky like cracked ice England · before 1911
- The earthquake is coming Zurich, Switzerland · c. 1910