Weather in a dream: what does it mean?
Weather in a dream is reported as the whole mood of the thing, and dreamers frequently describe the sky before anything that happened under it.
How do the four traditions read it?
Each reading below comes from a named tradition and a cited source, so you can see where it came from and decide what fits your dream. The four often disagree, and that is the point: a symbol rarely means one fixed thing, and the distance between Freud, Jung, modern research and myth tells you more than any single verdict could.
How did Freud read this symbol?
Freud paid less attention to setting than to incident, which is a gap in him rather than a judgement about dreams, and a modern reader is entitled to weigh the weather more heavily than he did.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
Jung took weather seriously as a state rather than a backdrop, and a Jungian reading would treat the sky as the content of the dream rather than the frame around it.
Our summary of a Jungian reading, in our own words, not Jung's. See Jung, ed., Man and His Symbols (1964).What does modern dream research say?
Dream settings are generated as readily as the figures in them, and weather is among the details dreamers report most confidently. Real conditions in the room, particularly temperature, can also be incorporated, so a cold night reliably produces some cold dreams.
Our summary of the neurocognitive account. See Domhoff, The Emergence of Dreaming (2018).What do myth and folklore say?
Weather divination is one of the largest bodies of folk knowledge there is, and a good deal of it encodes genuine local observation, which is why some of the sayings are accurate and most are not.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Frazer).How can writers use this symbol?
The same symbol, read as craft material rather than as a dream. What it does on the page, how genres use it differently, and what happens when you turn it inside out. Written for novelists, screenwriters and poets who need the symbol to actually work, and it ends with something to try.
Where does this appear in literature?
Weather is where a great many novels go slack, since it is the easiest thing to describe and the least likely to be doing work, and the rule that it should carry information is a good one.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
It sets a scene's emotional register before a character speaks, which is efficient and is why it is so heavily overused.
What are the genre conventions?
Nature writing earns it. Genre fiction uses the storm on the night of the murder, which readers forgave a century ago.
How to subvert it
Write a scene where the weather is entirely pleasant and everything in it is wrong.
Try this
Write three hundred words of a sky watched by somebody who works outdoors.
Only the first of these names a source. What a symbol does in a story, how genres treat it, how to invert it and what to try are our editorial judgement as writers and editors, not findings from a body of research. They are offered as craft opinion and should be argued with.
The books behind these readings
These are the books this entry actually draws on, not a general reading list. Where a text is in the public domain we link the free copy first, because you should not have to pay for something you can read for nothing. Every edition listed has been checked to exist and to be the right one.
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The Interpretation of Dreams
The source behind every Freud reading in the dictionary. This is the 1913 Brill translation we adapt from, and it is free to read online.
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Man and His Symbols
The accessible Jung, and the honest place to start for the archetype material our Jung readings summarise.
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The Golden Bough
Cross-cultural context for the myth readings. Public domain and free to read online.
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