When I dream of blue, it’s usually the color of cobalt glass, like the blue in Colleen’s photo. Certain associations have come up so often when I’ve worked these dreams that they pop to mind easily. The first is the association with depression and sadness. “I’m feeling blue,” is a familiar expression and experience for me, so that is perhaps the most obvious layer of meaning in my book. But for me it is also meditation, contemplation, as I have a vivid memory of being a kid, lying on my back on the broad lawn of our back yard, gazing up into a summer sky. The intensity of Colorado’s blue sky held me mesmerized, and ever since, blue, that nearly cobalt blue, has been my favorite color.
Cobalt itself carries an interesting association which I only discovered last spring, while exploring a dream with a friend. She looked up “cobalt” in the dictionary, and discovered that it is called “the goblin of the mine” because the miners found it among silver ore and considered it much less valuable. We both jumped to the association with “goblin of the mind,” as the rest of the dream had to do with negative self-talk.
Blue is also linked to the throat chakra in that system of understanding, and so has to do with using my voice. One dream worker offered his projection that it has to do with teaching, and I see the voice as the link there.
Taschen’s Book of Symbols offers a list of associations between blue and “the special, the highest, the most valued.”
Thus, a blue ribbon for first prize, a blue-ribbon (elite) committee, blue-chip stocks (those of the most valuable, most profitable companies), a blue blood (patrician), this last said to derive from the veins showing through the skin of fair –complexioned aristocrats.… (Taschen, p. 650)
So when I dreamed of finding a cobalt-blue sphere that allowed me to become lucid, my dream offered a symbol of my most valued, most talented part of myself leading the way into conscious awareness.
And, it offers the symbolism of the divine:
Given the unearthliness of blue and living as we do below the vast blue heavens, we have colored our gods blue—Kneph, Jupiter, Krishna, Vishnu, Odin—and our goddesses too: ‘Blue is the color of Mary’s celestial cloak; she is the earth covered by the blue tent of the sky’ (CW 11:123). (Taschen, p. 650, quoting the Collected Works of Jung)
Like all symbols, blue is multi-layered and sometimes apparently contradictory. How could something divine also be depressed? And yet, I can read all these associations into my dreams of blue, for, like a symbol, I am multi-layered and apparently contradictory.
6 thoughts on “Blue in Dreams”
I found your remarks on cobalt interesting, because it must be related to the word kobold, which is a kind of goblin.
That color blue makes me outrageously happy, but in a meditative way. I always associate it with the twilight sky. I remember when I was a kid folding laundry, Dad had a pair of socks that color and when I came upon them it would make me happy to think of the evening sky. Now I get a little pensive, but in a happy way (makes no sense, I know) thinking about Mom looking out the window at Venus and the moon in a sky like that in her last days, and the song I wrote about it as I was driving home looking at at sky like that and weeping as I drove and sang. “Though her body is failing, her spirit is happy.” That’s the feeling I get from that sky.
I also think of a blue glass heart that my husband gave me. I took it to the hospital when I had my hysterectomy, and that night I saw a meteor out the hospital window, and the blue glass was like the twilight sky.
Thank you so much for this essay.
It is from the German, kobold. I know what you mean about pensive in a happy way.
I saw a vivid cobalt blue car in a dream. I could not read the licence plate. There was snow on the ground.
I had a dream, and I heard the words cobalt blue. Many of my dreams are not visual, I just wake up knowing the words. I wonder what that means? I also heard the words orange juice. I felt that the OJ was just a suggestion that I need to drink, possibly for my health. But the cobalt blue? I found a stone I had that was cobalt blue and placed it under my pillow. I have thyroid issues which is located in my throat chakra. What’s your take on it?
I often have the experience of waking with words in my head, generally unrelated to whatever visual imagery the dreams have offered. I don’t really know why, other than my suspicion that dreams try to communicate in any way they can. My take on “orange juice” has to do with orange being associated with the second chakra, which is the creative center of the body, and “juice” being energy. Maybe I need to give more energy to my creativity, or exercising my creativity will give me more “juice”? I’m not sure what else to offer on “cobalt blue” than what I said in the post, but since the original dreamer has the association of thyroid issues, I’d take it as a suggestion to make sure that’s under control. Thanks for the comment!
My friend called me to tell me she had a very vivid dream that I owned a huge cobalt blue glass collection. She couldn’t get it out of her mind. What is the meaning of this dream.