The rain stops, the light changes, and there it is across the sky. A rainbow dream is one of the few that people tell happily. The old dream books were mostly pleased with it too, but not without conditions: the Japanese and Chinese books cared about its colour, and the Western ones about who was looking.
| Variant | What the old books read | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Seeing a rainbow | Health and prosperity; unusual happenings | Golden Wheel 1862; Miller 1901 |
| A red rainbow | Rising in the world | Yume handan jikkensho 1908; Zhougong 1880 |
| A dark rainbow | Quarrels | Yume handan jikkensho 1908; Zhougong 1880 |
| A double rainbow | No entry in any book cited here | none |
| A rainbow fading | No entry in any book cited here | none |
What does it mean to dream about a rainbow?
The Western books are the most enthusiastic. The Golden Wheel Dream-Book (1862) opens its entry with "It is an excellent dream to imagine you see a brilliant rainbow", adding "the brighter the better", and reads it as health and general prosperity. Miller's 1901 dream dictionary (Ten Thousand Dreams Interpreted) read a rainbow as unusual happenings, affairs taking a more promising turn and crops promising a plentiful yield.
In Japan, Karasawa Shōkaku's Yume handan jikkensho (1908) gives the rainbow two lines in its chapter on the sky, and both are about colour. Seeing a red rainbow was good, a sign of rising in the world; seeing a black rainbow meant quarrels. The Chinese Zhougong dream book, in its 1880 print, has the same pair in seven characters: a red rainbow good, a black one bad. The Meiji writer was following the Chinese line closely. The 1906 Yume handan, a Japanese translation of the Ming-era Menglin xuanjie, has no entry for simply seeing a rainbow; it uses the rainbow only as a comparison, as in its dream of one's whole body shining like a rainbow, which it read as fine clothes and a world growing more splendid.
What the rainbow looked like
These are readings from the old dream books, reported as history; no dream is a forecast.
What does it mean to dream of seeing a rainbow?
It stands over the fields or the city, and you stop to look. The Golden Wheel Dream-Book read a bright rainbow as health and prosperity, and for lovers a happy marriage. Miller read a rainbow hanging low over green trees as success in any undertaking. Psychologists hear relief: the weather has turned, and something that was grey is visible again.
What does it mean to dream of a red or a dark rainbow?
The colours are wrong: deep red, or a band almost black against the cloud. This is where the Japanese and Chinese books are most specific. The 1908 Japanese dream book read a red rainbow as a sign of rising in the world and a black one as quarrels, and the Zhougong list reads them the same way. Psychologists notice the mood of the colour more than the colour itself: a rainbow that should feel like relief and doesn't.
What does it mean to dream of a double rainbow?
Two arcs, the second fainter, its colours reversed. No book cited here has an entry for it. Psychologists tend to read the doubling as emphasis: relief that feels more than earned, or a hope that seems confirmed twice.
What happened to the rainbow
What does it mean to dream of a rainbow fading?
You turn to show someone and it is already going. No old book cited here reads a fading rainbow. Psychologists hear a good moment that won't hold still: relief that came and went, or a hope you are afraid to rely on. The dream often follows a day when good news arrived with a catch.
What does a rainbow dream mean psychologically?
Psychologists rarely read a rainbow on its own; they read it as the end of a storm. In dreams, the calm that follows a storm is often as telling as the storm itself, and the rainbow is that calm made visible. Rain in dreams tends to read as release, sadness or tension finally falling; the rainbow is what can be seen once it has fallen.
So the question a rainbow dream raises is usually what the storm was. For those dreams, see dreams about storms and dreams about rain.
A question to sit with
What difficult stretch has recently eased, and have you let yourself notice?
A dream book can tell you that a red rainbow once meant promotion. It can't tell you why your rainbows come after arguments, or only over the sea. That shows only when your dreams are recorded and kept together. Dreamlock, on the App Store for iPhone, is a private dream journal made for keeping them together: it listens to your dream, paints it, and notices when the same colours come back.