Dream symbols · Weather · Instinct

Heat

Pressure without an event. Unlike storm or fire, heat has no moment in it: it is a condition that makes everything slower and shorter tempered, and the tradition reads it as accumulated irritation or desire that has not found a form. It is one of the few weather images that is read more physically than symbolically, and it is worth checking the room before the psyche.

Where the reading comes from

The humoral tradition put anger and heat in the same category and did so consistently for centuries, which is where the ordinary language of a hot temper still comes from. Modern sleep research is blunter: an overheated room produces vivid and unpleasant dreams reliably.

Versions of the dream

Everyone affected

A shared condition in the dream tends to point outward, at a situation rather than a feeling.

Only the dreamer

The private version, and closer to the anger reading.

Seeking shade

What the dreamer moves toward is more informative than the heat itself.