In the interpretation of dreams, Storm is among the recurring images that traditional dream-books and modern depth psychology have alike tried to read. It is commonly interpreted as emotional turmoil, conflict, upheaval, and cleansing release.
Common readings
A storm is generally read as turbulent feeling or conflict breaking out, and sometimes as the release and clearing that follow when it passes.
The reading of dream symbols has a long documented history, from the Oneirocritica of Artemidorus in the second century to Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and the archetypal psychology of C. G. Jung. Such meanings are interpretive conventions of those traditions, offered here as ways the image has been understood rather than as fixed or established fact; in practice a symbol takes much of its sense from the individual dreamer and the setting of the dream.
Storm imagery draws on an ordinary conceptual metaphor documented by cognitive linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, in which emotional turmoil is routinely described in weather terms, a stormy relationship, a brewing conflict, independent of any dream-specific theory. Jungian interpretation separately reads a dreamed storm as an eruption of unconscious material or repressed affect breaking through into awareness, a specifically Jungian gloss built on the storm's disruptive, uncontrollable character. Both readings are genuine attributed positions from named intellectual traditions, cognitive linguistics and analytical psychology respectively, and neither amounts to evidence that storm dreams carry one fixed meaning for the person who reports them.