Dreaming about
rain

Rain is the weather of bad news in films, where it falls on every funeral and every breakup, but it's also what gardens and farmers wait for. Dreaming about rain can lean either way. It usually points to sadness, to feelings that are finally being let out, or to renewal after a dry stretch in your life.

The rain itself is only half the story, and where you were when it fell is the other half. A soft shower you watch from a warm room is a very different dream from a storm that catches you on the way home. And rain on a field isn't rain through your own ceiling. Your week matters too, because a loss, a long wait or a sudden relief can all come out as rain at night.

What dreaming about rain means

Rain falls on all of us at once and we can't do much about it, so dreams use it for moods more than for events. Most rain dreams fit one of four readings, and the way the rain felt is usually what tells them apart.

Sadness and tears

The oldest reading of rain is also the simplest one, because rain falling from a gray sky looks like crying, and English has noticed (we say the sky is weeping, or that someone has a cloud over them). A rain dream with a heavy, flat feeling often comes when you're low, grieving, or holding back tears you haven't had time for. If you've been telling everyone you're fine, the dream may be doing the crying for you.

Letting it out

Rain is also how the weather breaks its own tension. After a hot, heavy day, a downpour clears the air, and the air feels lighter once the storm finally breaks. A rain dream that felt like relief usually means something you've been carrying is coming out, whether it's an argument finally had, a confession, or a cry you didn't know you needed.

Growth after a dry spell

To anyone who grows things, rain is simply good news. Seeds don't start without it, and a drought that breaks is a reason to celebrate. A dream of rain on a garden or a dry city often comes after a stretch with no energy, no money or no affection. It tends to arrive at the point where things start to move again.

Plans that get rained on

Then there's the everyday reading, where rain is simply in the way. It rains on your parade, you take a rain check, you save for a rainy day, the trip is called off. If the rain in your dream spoiled a wedding, a party or a day out, look at what plan in your life feels at risk of being canceled or watered down.

Dreaming about heavy rain

Heavy rain is a feeling that has stopped being a drizzle. A downpour that hammers the roof and floods the street is about emotions or problems arriving faster than you can deal with them. We all know the "when it rains, it pours" week, where everything goes wrong together. If you were out in it with nowhere to shelter, think about where you feel exposed right now. If you were safe inside listening to it, the dream may be about getting through a hard time with a roof over your head, in every sense.

Dreaming about rain inside the house

Rain inside your house is the strangest version of the dream and one of the most telling ones. A house is often your private life in dreams, and rain belongs outside it. So rain in the kitchen or the bedroom is sadness or trouble getting into a place that should be protected. It often comes when a family member is going through something hard, or when a worry from work has started to follow you home. If nobody else in the dream seemed to notice the rain, ask whether you're the only one at home who sees a problem.

Dreaming about being caught in the rain

Getting caught in the rain without a coat is about being unprepared. A sudden shower that soaks you to the skin tends to come when something has taken you by surprise, a bill, a conversation or a feeling you didn't see coming. But a lot depends on how you took it. Shivering and miserable, it's a dream about being let down by circumstances, and laughing and soaked, it's a dream about not caring any more what happens to your hair.

Dreaming about watching rain from a window

Watching rain from behind glass is the reflective rain dream. You're warm, you're safe, and you're looking at something you're not part of. It often comes during a quiet or thoughtful period, when you're turning something over without having to act on it yet. It can also be a sign that you feel a little shut in, watching life happen outside while you wait for it to clear up.

Dreaming about a thunderstorm

A thunderstorm adds noise and danger to the rain, and both change the dream. Thunder is anger in English (someone with a face like thunder), and lightning is something sudden that strikes without warning, so a storm dream is often about a conflict that's about to break, or one that just did. Was the storm over a particular house, or following a particular person? That's where the tension is. But if it passed and the air cleared, the dream may be telling you the row was worth having.

Dreaming about dancing in the rain

Dancing in the rain is the most joyful rain dream, and it's about letting go. You've stopped trying to stay dry, which in waking life might mean you've stopped trying to control something, or you've accepted a situation you were fighting. It often comes after a decision that felt risky and turned out to be freeing. Did you quit something lately, or finally say yes to something? If you were dancing alone, the dream is about your own release, and if someone was with you, it's about the joy of being a bit ridiculous together.

Dreaming about rain and an umbrella

An umbrella is protection, so a dream of rain and an umbrella is about how well you're shielded from what's falling on you. A good umbrella means you're coping, and one that blows inside out or leaks is support that isn't holding up (a partner, a job, your own defenses). Sharing an umbrella with someone puts you both under the same small roof, which is often about closeness. Freud, for his part, would have read the umbrella itself differently, as a male symbol (more on that below).

Dreaming about rain and a rainbow

A rain dream that ends with a rainbow, or rain with the sun still out, is about something hard turning out all right. It's the most hopeful version of the dream. People often have it at the tail end of a difficult period, when the worst is over and they're starting to believe it. If the rainbow appeared while the rain was still heavy, the dream may be about finding something good in the middle of a hard time.

Dreaming about rain according to Jung and Freud

Rain isn't a symbol most dream writers discuss by name, so what follows is mostly their wider ideas applied to it, and said as that.

Jung on rain: water from above

For Jung, water was the picture the unconscious reaches for more than any other.^[1] Rain is that water arriving from above, on everything at once, and the part that fits his idea best is the one you can't control: you can step out of a river, but you can't step out of the weather. So a rain dream can be the unconscious making itself felt in your daily life, whether you invited it or not. What rain means to you (a grandfather's farm, a wet commute, a holiday ruined) comes before any of this, which is also why Jung distrusted ready-made symbol dictionaries.

Freud on rain: the umbrella and the day before

Freud didn't single out rain, but he did list the umbrella among the long objects (sticks, tree trunks, knives) that stand for the male body in dreams.^[2] So for him, opening an umbrella in the rain could carry a sexual meaning. His other tool was the day residue, and it's the more useful one here: the ordinary rain you walked through that afternoon is very likely where the picture came from, and the question is why that image and not another.

Other readings

Ernest Hartmann, a psychiatrist born in Vienna who did his sleep research at Tufts University in the US, argued that a dream gives an emotion a picture, and one of his examples of vulnerability is a dreamer lost and helpless on a huge plain in beating rain, with no shelter.^[3] A rain dream raises the same question, which is what feeling the rain is standing in for. Tens of thousands of dreams passed through the hands of the American psychologist Calvin Hall, who counted them, and he held that the setting of a dream carries how you see the world, with a turbulent one pictured as thunderstorms and raging seas and a benign one as serene nature.^[4] Applied to your dream, that makes the rest of the weather worth noting, because a shower in sunlight and rain with thunder describe different worlds.

The biblical and spiritual meaning of rain in dreams

The Bible and the Quran both mention rain, mostly as a blessing.

Rain in the Bible

Noah's flood begins with rain for forty days and forty nights,^[5] but elsewhere rain is grace itself, and Moses asks that his teaching "drop as the rain" on young grass.^[6] Jesus points out that God sends rain on the just and on the unjust alike,^[7] which is a reading some people find comforting after a rain dream that seemed to punish them.

Rain in the Quran

In the Quran's version of Joseph's story, he reads the king's dream of fat and lean cows as a run of seven plentiful years and then seven hard ones, and adds that a year will come after them in which the people have abundant rain.^[8]

Questions to ask about your rain dream

The same shower can stand for grief or for relief, so it's worth going over a few details before you decide which yours was.

• Were you out in the rain, or watching it from somewhere dry?
• Did it feel sad, cleansing, frightening or fun?
• Was it a drizzle, a downpour or a storm?
• Did the rain spoil something, or help something grow?
• What feeling have you been holding back recently?

Oniri asks you a short set of questions like these before it reads a dream, so your rain gets read in the light of your own week.