What Does Dreaming About Clouds Mean?

Psychologically, clouds drift and change across the sky — and since the sky often reflects the mind and outlook, clouds most often touch your thoughts, moods, and the passing states of your mind: the drifting, changing, passing nature of your thoughts and feelings, and the 'weather' of your outlook. Clouds are the image of moods and thoughts passing across the sky of the mind.

This carries several charges. As moods and outlook, the kind of clouds reflects the mood: light, fluffy white clouds touch a light, peaceful, pleasant mood, daydreams, and ease; dark, heavy storm clouds touch gathering trouble, gloom, a darkening mood, or looming difficulty. As passing and changeable, clouds drifting and changing touch the passing, transient nature of moods and thoughts — they gather and pass. As obscured clarity, clouds that cover the sun or sky touch 'clouded' thinking, obscured clarity, confusion, or something blocking the light. As daydreams and detachment, 'having your head in the clouds' touches daydreaming, being detached from reality, or lost in thought and fantasy. As the lofty or spiritual, clouds high above can touch the lofty, the heavens, or aspiration. Whether the clouds are light and fluffy, dark and stormy, drifting and passing, obscuring the light, or you're up among them usually mirrors your moods and outlook, passing thoughts and feelings, clouded or clearing clarity, daydreams and detachment, and the 'weather' of your inner state.

A Freudian reading would attend to clouds as the drifting, changing forms across the sky of the mind — the passing moods and thoughts, the gathering or clearing of the inner weather, evoking the transient states of feeling and the obscuring or clearing of clarity. Clouds can embody the passing moods and thoughts, the gathering gloom or lightness, and the obscuring of clarity drifting across the mind.

Their drifting and gathering carry the charge of passing mood and of obscured or clearing clarity. What clouds evoke — the lightness of fluffy clouds, the gloom of gathering storm, the obscuring of the light — tends to point at the dreamer's relationship to mood and clarity: the passing, changeable states of feeling and thought drifting across the mind, the gathering or lifting of the inner weather, and the clouding or clearing of clarity.

Scripture's clouds are charged with God's presence and guidance — the pillar of cloud that led Israel, the cloud of God's glory filling the temple, the 'cloud of witnesses,' and the Lord coming 'in the clouds.' Yet clouds also figure the transient ('vanished away... as the morning cloud'). Clouds touch this theme of God's presence and guidance, glory, and the passing and transient.

A clouds dream, read this way, can touch the passing, the obscured, presence, or guidance. A biblical sensibility might weigh clouds between the transient ('as the morning cloud' that passes) and the cloud of God's presence and guidance (the pillar that led, the glory that filled the temple) — reading the dream as a prompt to hold passing moods and thoughts lightly (as clouds that gather and pass), and perhaps to discern, even in a 'clouded' or obscured time, the presence and guidance that can lead through, as the cloud led Israel through the wilderness.

In Islamic sensibility the clouds are a sign of God's power and mercy — the clouds He drives and gathers to bring down rain (mercy and life) upon the earth, a recurring sign to reflect upon; clouds evoke God's power, the bringing of rain and mercy, and a sign of His provision. The cloud evokes God's signs, the bringing of rain and mercy, and a prompt to reflection.

A clouds dream, in this frame, might point to passing moods, gathering trouble or relief, obscured clarity, or a sign to reflect on. Held with humility, clouds can recall God's power in driving and gathering the clouds that bring rain and mercy (a sign of His provision), inviting reflection on His signs, and a trust that even gathering clouds (of trouble or 'clouded' times) may bring the rain of mercy and relief — holding passing moods lightly and trusting the One who gathers and disperses the clouds.

In a Hindu frame clouds touch the passing, changing states (an echo of the transient, ever-changing nature of the mind and its moods, and of the world of appearance) and, in their bringing of rain, the cycles of nourishment and grace; clouds also touch the obscuring of clarity (the clouds that veil the sun, as thoughts veil the clear mind). Clouds evoke the passing, changing states of mind, the bringing of rain and nourishment, and the veiling of clarity.

A clouds dream, in this frame, can point to passing moods and thoughts, gathering trouble or relief, obscured clarity, or daydreams. The tradition's note attends to the passing and the veiling: clouds as an image of the ever-changing, passing states of the mind (drifting and clearing) and of the clouds that veil the clear sky of awareness (as thoughts veil the clear mind) — an invitation to hold passing moods and thoughts lightly, watching them drift and clear, and to the clear sky of awareness behind the passing clouds of the mind.