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Tornado in dreams: what it can mean

  • Fear and danger
  • Nature
  • Change

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The short answer

A tornado is a force you can see coming but cannot stop. Many dreamers connect it with an emotion, a person or a situation that feels like it is about to sweep everything up.

Your dream is not everyone's

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Three ways to read it

Psychology and research

Research

Tornadoes and strong winds appear among the natural disaster themes that people report in surveys of typical dreams. The continuity view reads them as a picture of waking turbulence: anger in the house, fast change, or anxiety that seems to build on its own. Threat simulation theory, one contested account, sees such dreams as rehearsal for danger. Watching it from a distance and being inside it are very different dreams.

Folk tradition

Tradition, not science

Tradition: American popular dream books, around 1900

Miller's 1901 dream dictionary read being in the path of a whirlwind as facing a change that threatens to overwhelm one's plans. It is one old popular reading, reported as history rather than prediction.

Questions to ask yourself

  1. What in your life feels like it is building up and heading your way?
  2. Did you find shelter, and who was with you?
  3. Is the storm outside you, or is some of it your own feeling?

Related symbols

Sources

Every reading on this page comes from these works. Page references have not all been checked yet; those still waiting are marked.

  1. Tore A. Nielsen, Antonio L. Zadra, Valérie Simard, Sébastien Saucier, Philippe Stenstrom, Carlyle Smith, Don Kuiken (2003). The typical dreams of Canadian university students. Dreaming 13(4): 211-235.

    cited, not reproduced

    • Cited at: typical dreams questionnaire, results (reference not yet checked)

    Survey of how many people report having had common dream themes (being chased, falling, teeth, flying, exams, nakedness and others) at least once.

  2. G. William Domhoff (2001). A New Neurocognitive Theory of Dreams. Dreaming 11(1): 13-33.

    cited, not reproduced

    • Cited at: pp. 13-33 (dreams as simulations of personal concerns) (reference not yet checked)

    Dreams as embodied simulations of personal concerns (the continuity view). The backbone of our psychology lens.

  3. Antti Revonsuo (2000). The reinterpretation of dreams: An evolutionary hypothesis of the function of dreaming. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 23(6): 877-901.

    cited, not reproducedcontested theory

    • Cited at: pp. 877-901 (threat simulation theory) (reference not yet checked)

    Threat simulation theory: dreams as rehearsal for danger. Influential but contested; presented as one theory among several.

  4. Gustavus Hindman Miller (1901). What's in a Dream (later reissued as Ten Thousand Dreams Interpreted).

    public domain

    • Cited at: entry: Whirlwind (reference not yet checked)

    An American popular dream dictionary. Its entries are written as omens ("foretells"); we only report how people once read a symbol, never as a forecast.