Storm

In the interpretation of dreams, Storm is among the recurring images that traditional dream-books and modern depth psychology have alike tried to read. It is commonly interpreted as emotional turmoil, conflict, upheaval, and cleansing release.

Common readings

A storm is generally read as turbulent feeling or conflict breaking out, and sometimes as the release and clearing that follow when it passes.

The reading of dream symbols has a long documented history, from the Oneirocritica of Artemidorus in the second century to Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and the archetypal psychology of C. G. Jung. Such meanings are interpretive conventions of those traditions, offered here as ways the image has been understood rather than as fixed or established fact; in practice a symbol takes much of its sense from the individual dreamer and the setting of the dream.

Storm imagery draws on an ordinary conceptual metaphor documented by cognitive linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, in which emotional turmoil is routinely described in weather terms, a stormy relationship, a brewing conflict, independent of any dream-specific theory. Jungian interpretation separately reads a dreamed storm as an eruption of unconscious material or repressed affect breaking through into awareness, a specifically Jungian gloss built on the storm's disruptive, uncontrollable character. Both readings are genuine attributed positions from named intellectual traditions, cognitive linguistics and analytical psychology respectively, and neither amounts to evidence that storm dreams carry one fixed meaning for the person who reports them.

The storm is where several religions located the voice of God. The book of Job resolves, insofar as it resolves at all, with the Lord answering Job out of the whirlwind; Sinai is wrapped in thunder and cloud; the storm riders Baal, Indra, Thor and Zeus held the chief thrones of their pantheons, and the psalmist's storm strips the forest bare while everything in the temple cries glory. Weather was the first theatre of the numinous, and the dream storm inherits a stage on which power beyond the dreamer's scale has always performed.

The old handbooks read storms practically, as they read the sea, danger for those whose living was exposed to weather, disturbance of affairs for the rest, with the storm passed over or survived read toward trouble outlasted. The folk dictionaries kept the same line, quarrels brewing, news breaking, the air cleared afterward.

The modern psychological reading holds the image at its plainest: the storm as emotion at a scale the dreamer cannot manage, anger, grief or crisis gathering, breaking and passing, with the dream's position in that sequence, the darkening sky, the storm's height, the strange calm after, read as a report on where the dreamer stands in their own weather. Interpreters note that the aftermath matters as much as the violence, since storms in dreams, as in the older theophanies, tend to leave the landscape changed and the air breathable.