Dreaming about
ice

Ice is water that has stopped moving (a pond in January, a tray in the freezer), and that one fact carries most of its meaning in dreams. Dreaming about ice usually points to something that has frozen in your life, often a feeling you've stopped letting yourself have, or a situation that has stalled. It can also be about risk, because ice looks solid and isn't always. The dreams people search for most (thin ice, falling through, skating) are all about how far you trust the surface under you.

Then there's the ice you eat, since ice cream turns up in these dreams almost as often as a frozen lake does. It's a very different dream, one about treats and summer and a pleasure you have to enjoy quickly. So before reading anything into the ice, notice what kind it was, what you were doing on it or with it, and how cold the rest of your life feels right now.

What dreaming about ice means

English is full of ice for emotional things. We give people the cold shoulder, freeze them out, break the ice at parties and put plans on ice. Dreams use the same language, and most ice dreams fall into one of these readings.

Feelings that have frozen

When a feeling is too painful to deal with, people often stop feeling it for a while, and ice is how dreams picture that. A dream of a frozen house, a frozen face or a frozen landscape often comes after a loss or a shock, when you're coping by going numb. Hans Christian Andersen built a whole fairy tale on it, The Snow Queen, where a splinter of glass turns a boy's heart to ice. If you were cold in the dream and couldn't get warm, ask what you haven't let yourself feel.

A situation on hold

When English puts something "on ice", it's paused, waiting to be picked up again. A dream of ice can be about a project, a relationship or a decision that has stalled, and about whether you're waiting for spring or avoiding the thaw. If the ice in your dream was beautiful and still, you may be content with the pause. But if it felt like a trap, you may be ready to get things moving again. Dante made the same point in the Inferno, where the lowest circle of hell is a frozen lake with traitors held fast in it, an old picture of the worst place being the one where nothing moves.

Danger under a calm surface

An iceberg shows only its tip, with most of its mass below the water, which is where "the tip of the iceberg" comes from. Ice dreams sometimes carry that warning feeling, a sense that what you can see is only a small part of a problem. Was there something dark under the ice, or did you sense depth below you? Then look for a worry in your life that's bigger than it first looked.

Dreaming about ice cream

Ice cream is the pleasant ice dream, and it's mostly about treats, play and the long summers of childhood. Eating it with someone points to an easy, light moment you'd like more of. An ice cream that melts down your arm before you can finish is the more anxious version, a good thing you can't enjoy in time. It often comes when you feel too busy or too pressed to make the most of something. If you were buying ice cream for children, the dream may be about wanting to give them (or yourself) a carefree day.

Dreaming about ice skating

Ice skating is graceful when it works and painful when it doesn't, so the dream depends almost entirely on how well you skated. Gliding easily is confidence. It's the feeling of moving smoothly through a situation that should be hard, the kind where you half expect to fall and somehow don't, and it often comes when something at work or at home is going better than you dared hope. Wobbling, clinging to the edge or falling over and over is about feeling out of your depth, perhaps in a new job or a new relationship, where everyone else seems to know how. Skating with someone is about how in step you are with them.

Dreaming about walking on thin ice

"Skating on thin ice" means taking a risk that could go wrong at any moment, and this dream is that phrase almost word for word. It usually comes when you know you're pushing your luck, maybe with a boss or a partner, or with money or your health. Did you make it across? Getting to the other side suggests you think you'll get away with it, while freezing in the middle points to a choice you can't put off much longer.

Dreaming about falling through ice

Falling through ice is the frightening version. The surface gives, and you're in freezing water. It's often about a sudden drop into feelings you'd kept frozen, grief or fear coming up all at once. Water under the ice adds weight to that reading. If you climbed out, the dream is about surviving the shock, and if you were pulled out by someone, notice who.

Dreaming about slipping on ice

Slipping on ice is losing your footing on something that looked fine, an everyday hazard turned into a dream. It often comes when a routine part of life (a job you know, a friendship you rely on) suddenly feels unsafe. A fall that hurts is a setback you're worried about. Catching yourself means you still trust your balance, and that the ground hasn't gone, only got slippery.

Dreaming about melting ice

Melting ice is a thaw, and it's usually a hopeful dream, as snow melting is. Something frozen is starting to move again, like a feeling you'd shut down, a stuck project or a relationship that went cold. Dripping icicles and cracking rivers are spring arriving. But if the melting felt threatening, as with a flood coming or a frozen place you loved disappearing, the dream may be about change happening faster than you'd like.

Dreaming about ice according to Jung and Freud

Ice isn't something either of them wrote about, so these two readings apply their ideas to it.

Jung on the unconscious gone hard

Jung wrote that water is the commonest picture dreams use for the unconscious.^[1] Ice is water that has stopped moving, so by his idea it's the unconscious gone hard: feelings and memories that can't flow or be reached while they're frozen. A dream of skating over it can be about keeping busy on the surface of something deep. A thaw would be the unconscious starting to move again, which is uncomfortable and usually good.

Freud on the easy wish and the day before

Freud's starting point was that a dream fulfils a wish, and ice cream is the easy case, because the wish (a treat, a hot day, being a child again) sits on the surface. A frozen lake needs the other half of his method: what you saw or heard the day before, such as a cold snap, a rink on the news or someone telling you you're on thin ice, and what "cold" brings to mind before any dictionary does.^[2]

Other readings

Artemidorus, a 2nd-century dream interpreter from Daldis who collected dreams and what came of them in the marketplaces of Greece, Asia and Italy, held that snow and frost seen in their own season mean nothing, because the soul is only remembering the day's cold to the sleeping body.^[3] A cold night and an icy dream may need no more explanation than that. Calvin Hall, a psychologist with a library of more than 50,000 dream reports, read a dream's setting as the dreamer's view of the world, so a cold, bleak climate is how someone who finds the world cold and bleak would draw it.^[4]

Questions to ask about your ice dream

Most ice dreams come down to what's frozen and how safe you felt on top of it, and these questions help you find that.

• Was the ice solid, thin, cracking or melting?
• Were you walking, skating, falling through or eating it?
• How cold did you feel, and did anyone help you get warm?
• What in your life feels frozen, paused or numb right now?
• Where are you taking a risk you know is a risk?

Oniri asks you questions like these before it gives a reading, so a frozen lake after a breakup and an ice cream on holiday end up meaning very different things.