Dreaming about
snow

Snow means two different things to most adults, the thrill of a snow day as a child and the slush and canceled plans of a grown-up winter, and dreams draw on both. Dreaming about snow usually points to feelings that have gone cold or quiet, a stretch of life that feels frozen or lonely, or the clean slate of a fresh start. Which one it is often comes down to whether the snow felt like a blanket or like a wall.

The details of the dream decide the rest. Snow falling softly past a window is a long way from a blizzard on a mountain road. Building a snowman with your kids isn't the same dream as sinking to your knees in a drift alone, either. And what's going on in your life matters as much, because a breakup, a quiet winter at home and a new job can all show up as snow.

What dreaming about snow means

Snow does something no other weather does: it covers everything evenly, muffles sound and stops a whole town for a day or two. Most snow dreams take one of those habits and turn it into a feeling.

Feelings put on ice

English is full of cold feelings, and we use them without noticing. We give someone the cold shoulder, freeze someone out, go cold on a plan or have cold feet before a wedding. Snow in a dream can be that kind of chill, especially if it covered something you used to care about (a garden, a house, a road you used to take). Ask what in your life has gone quiet that once felt warm, and whether you chose to let it cool.

Quiet and being alone

Fresh snow soaks up sound, so after a heavy fall the world really does go quiet. A snowy landscape with nobody in it often comes when you feel alone, or cut off from people who used to be close. But quiet isn't always loneliness. If the empty snow felt peaceful, the dream may be about rest you've been needing, or a pause you're grateful for.

A clean slate

New snow wipes the ground clean and shows every first footprint, which is why it so often turns up around a fresh start. A move, a new relationship, a decision to stop drinking or change jobs can all come with a dream of untouched snow. The feeling of the dream tells you whether you're excited by the blank page or a little scared of it.

Childhood and play

For many people snow is tied to being a kid, to sledding, snowball fights and a school that closed for the day. A snow dream full of play is often nostalgia, a wish for a time with fewer responsibilities, or a nudge to have some fun. Holidays come into it too, since snow and Christmas sit close together in a lot of memories.

Dreaming about snow falling

Watching snow fall is one of the calmest dreams there is, and it's usually about a change arriving slowly. The first flakes are the start of something, a season of your life you can feel coming before it's here. Heavy snow that kept falling is a change that's piling up faster than you'd like. If it has actually been snowing where you live, the simplest reading is that your dream picked up the week, since our dreams lean heavily on what we've been seeing and doing.^[1]

Dreaming about a snowstorm

A blizzard is snow you can't see through, and that's the heart of the dream. Dreams of a whiteout, where the road, the horizon and the people around you all disappear, are usually about losing your sense of direction, close to dreams of being lost. They tend to come when there's too much happening at once and you can't make out the next step. If you were walking into the wind with your head down, the dream may be showing how hard you've been pushing through something without stopping to look up.

Dreaming about being stuck in snow

Being stuck in snow is a dream about progress that has stalled. Wheels spinning in a drift, legs sinking with every step, a door blocked by snow, each is a plan or a relationship (or a recovery) that isn't moving however hard you try. But being snowed in can also feel cozy. If you were stuck at home with a fire and a book, the dream is more about wanting a reason to stop than about being trapped. When the snow came down a mountainside all at once, the dream is an avalanche, which has its own page.

Dreaming about melting snow

Melting snow is the thaw, and it's mostly a hopeful dream. Feelings that were frozen are coming back, a cold patch with someone is ending, or a lonely period is easing. Thaws are messy, though, with slush, mud and water running everywhere. If the melting felt dirty or chaotic, the change is real but untidy (a reconciliation with some hard talks still in it, say).

Dreaming about playing in the snow

Playing in snow is the dream's way of giving you permission to have fun. Sledding is about letting go and enjoying speed you don't fully control. A snowball fight is play with a bit of aggression in it (a way to tease or test someone you're close to), so who were you throwing snowballs at? A snowman is something you built that you know won't last, so a snowman melting, falling over or missing its face can be about effort you're afraid will come to nothing.

Dreaming about footprints in the snow

Snow and wet sand are about the only places most of us ever see our own trail. Following footprints in the snow is often about following someone else's example, or a path somebody chose for you. Seeing tracks behind you that you didn't make can feel like being followed, by a person or by your own past. And a field of fresh snow with no prints at all is the untouched start in its purest form, with the first step left to you.

Dreaming about snow in summer

Snow out of season is a dream about something that doesn't fit its moment. It often comes during a time that should feel warm, like a holiday, a wedding or a new relationship, when part of you feels cold or sad anyway. It can also mean something surprising has happened, good or bad, that nobody saw coming. If the summer snow was beautiful, the dream may be about a rare, strange happiness you didn't expect.

Dreaming about snow according to Jung and Freud

Neither man has a famous reading of snow, so what follows lends their ideas to it.

Jung: snow as compensation

Jung thought a dream supplies what your waking attitude leaves out, a counterweight to a lopsided day.^[6] Snow can do that in both directions. For someone running hot (overworked, always reachable, never still), it's the one weather that stops everything, a quiet the waking self won't grant. For someone who has been cool and careful with their feelings, a thaw makes the correction from the other side. He also distrusted ready-made lists of symbols, so the winters you remember, a school closed for the day or one hard January, count for more here than anything this page says.

Freud: the snow day

Freud read a dream as a wish shown already granted.^[7] Snow is the weather that grants a wish most adults still have, a day with nothing demanded of them: schools close, the commute dies, a whole town is let off. A snow dream in a month of too many obligations can be that wish in its plainest disguise. True to his method he would also look at the day before, so if it really was snowing outside, start there.

Other readings

Artemidorus, the 2nd-century Greek diviner, sorted dreams into those that foretell and those that merely replay the day, and snow was his example of a dream that means nothing. Seen in its own season, he wrote, snow and frost are only the soul recalling the day's cold to the sleeping body.^[2] Out of season he read it differently, as plans that go cold, which is where he meets the summer snow above. Calvin Hall, an American psychologist who collected more than 50,000 dream reports, held that the setting of a dream carries the dreamer's view of the world, so a world that feels cold and bleak turns up as a cold climate and a rocky setting.^[3]

The biblical and spiritual meaning of snow in dreams

The Bible is the one tradition we cite with a specific picture of snow, and it's a picture of being made clean.

Snow in the Bible

In the Bible snow is mostly about being made clean. "Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow," asks the psalm,^[4] and in Isaiah sins that are scarlet are made "white as snow".^[5] If your snow dream felt peaceful or holy, forgiveness and a fresh start are the ideas the tradition puts next to it.

Questions to ask about your snow dream

Snow can be a comfort or a trap depending on the dream, so before deciding what yours meant, think back over a few details.

• Did the snow feel peaceful, beautiful, cold or dangerous?
• Were you alone in it, or with people?
• Was it falling, lying still, drifting or melting?
• Could you move freely, or were you stuck?
• What in your life has gone quiet, or cold, or started over lately?

When you describe a snow dream to Oniri, it asks you a few questions along these lines before it reads it. That way a peaceful snowfall and a blizzard don't end up with the same answer.