Chinese New Year and dreams: luck, ancestors and the dream book of Zhou Gong

Chinese New Year, the Spring Festival, is the most important festival of the year. Families come together, houses are cleaned and decorated, and everything revolves around a good start. It is also a time when people pay extra attention to signs of luck, and dreams belong to that.

In short

Around Chinese New Year many families pay extra attention to signs of luck, and dreams belong to that.
In folk tradition and the dream book of Zhou Gong, fish, water, dragons and red are often favourable images, sometimes through wordplay.
New Year is also a festival of the ancestors: a dream about deceased family is then read as closeness.
Some families read bad dreams by contraries, as luck; that is folk belief, not a prediction.

The Spring Festival in brief

Chinese New Year falls on the first day of the lunar calendar, between late January and mid-February. In the days before, the house is thoroughly cleaned, to sweep away the old year and its misfortune. On New Year's Eve the family eats the reunion dinner together. On New Year's Day itself people precisely do not sweep, so as not to sweep the new luck straight out of the door.

Red is everywhere: red lanterns, red envelopes with money, red sayings on the door. According to an old legend red together with firecrackers chased away the monster Nian, which threatened villages at the end of the year.

Dreams and the folk tradition

Many Chinese families know the Zhou Gong Jie Meng, the dream book attributed to the Duke of Zhou, although it was compiled centuries after his life. The book explains dreams through images, sounds and wordplay, and is often used with a smile. Around New Year those readings get extra attention: a favourable dream in the first days of the year feels like a good omen.

At the same time the tradition is sober. Someone who spends the whole week busy with food, family and red dreams about it too. A dream is then seen above all as a reflection of a busy, festive time.

Favourable dream images around New Year

Fish: yu sounds like the word for abundance. The well-known saying nian nian you yu wishes a surplus every year. A fish in a dream is therefore almost always read favourably around New Year. Red and firecrackers: joy, protection and a powerful start. Mandarins and oranges: their names sound like luck and gold. A dragon: strength, prosperity and success, especially in a dragon year. Dumplings: they resemble old silver ingots and stand for wealth.

The animal of the new year can also turn up in a dream. Many people read that as a personal greeting from the year that is beginning.

Ancestors at the table

New Year is also a festival of the ancestors. In many families offerings are made at the home altar on New Year's Eve: food, incense and sometimes paper money. The ancestors are thus invited to celebrate along. The Qingming festival in April is the day graves are tended, but at New Year too the ancestors belong.

Someone who dreams in these days of a deceased grandparent at the festive table can read it in that tradition as a sign that the family stays connected. A smiling or eating ancestor counts as favourable. An ancestor asking for something, as an invitation to remember or to tend the altar.

The Kitchen God and a clean slate

A week before New Year, according to folk tradition, the Kitchen God, Zao Jun, travels to heaven to report on the household. Families sometimes smear something sweet on his image, so that he speaks only sweet words. That story fits the mood of the season: tidying up, making amends and starting with a clean slate.

A dream about cleaning, throwing out old things or a house becoming light is therefore often read favourably around New Year: the old goes, room comes for the new. A messy house in a dream can instead be a reminder of something that still wants to be cleared.

Reverse dreams and superstition

In folk tradition the opposite of a bad dream is sometimes expected: someone who dreams of misfortune would in fact get luck. Around New Year people also prefer not to talk about misfortune, death or illness, so as not to burden the new year. Someone with a bad dream therefore often keeps it to themselves in these days.

Such customs are folk interpretation, not fixed rules. If you want to know how the folk tradition reads a particular image, many symbols on this site have a reading according to Zhou Gong.