Dreaming of brown : what can this symbol evoke?

The colour of what remains

Mix enough colours and you get brown. It is the hue everything converges towards when nothing is separated any more — that of earth, of dead leaves, of wood, of everything returned to the ground.

Dreams use this colour for what has lost its brilliance without losing any substance. A period when nothing shines, when the bright colours of before have merged, and which is nonetheless not a dead period. It is the colour of the ground and of the fundamental.

The question it poses is this : is what you are going through without relief really a loss, or the state of a matter preparing something else? Nothing grows anywhere but in that colour.

A colour without prestige

No tradition made brown a noble colour : it is that of work clothes, of mendicant monks' habits, of ordinary bread. It is not worn to be seen.

That humility is the symbol's second meaning, and a valuable one. Dreams often use brown for a chosen modesty — a sobriety, a voluntary withdrawal from competition, a life that gave up brilliance without giving up substance.

What to look for is your feeling before that colour. Boredom says it is imposed on you ; rest says it suits you — and many dreamers discover they find it restful when they thought it dull.

What the brown covers changes the reading

• Turned earth — a ready ground, where nothing grows yet and everything can.
• Browned dead leaves — what has ended and returns to the soil to feed what follows.
• A brown garment worn without thinking — a sobriety become natural, or an effacement not chosen.
• A dirty, muddy brown — the mixture that found no form, soiling rather than nourishing.
• Brown wood polished by use — what time made better.
• An entirely brown world — a period without relief, not necessarily a dead one.

A psychological reading, not a ready-made box

Depth psychology takes an interest in colours as affective tonalities, placing brown on the side of the ground : what goes unnoticed and on which the rest rests. It notes that dreams where colour fades often accompany periods of stripping that are not depressions. Other readings retain the earth and its nourishing function, recalling that nothing grows in what shines.