On its own in the grass, a desert locust is a quiet insect that hops away when you get close. Crowd it in with others for a few hours and its behavior changes; young locusts raised in a crowd even turn darker, marked with yellow and black. Those are the ones that form swarms big enough to strip a field. Same animal, living alone or in a crowd: locusts are simply grasshoppers with a swarming phase. That double life is how I read grasshopper dreams, so before anything else, I'd want to know about yours. Did you see one, or thousands?

What does it mean when a grasshopper jumps in front of you?

Most often, it points to getting from one place to another without the steps in between: a quick decision, a change you can feel coming that won't happen one step at a time.

A large grasshopper can jump about three feet, roughly twenty times its body length, without opening its wings. Dreams tend to keep that mismatch: a tiny body, a huge distance. Notice which way it jumped. Toward you, it's like an opportunity showing up unannounced, one you'll need to grab quickly. Away from you, it's more like something you let slip, or a part of you that would rather already be somewhere else. If you were jumping along with it, the reading moves closer to dreams about leaping: momentum, and a touch of vertigo.

In my view, this dream often shows up after a long run of small, sensible steps, when part of you feels the road is too slow. It isn't telling you to jump. It's showing you that the urge is there. What's left is figuring out whether it's a leap or an escape. A leap leaves you curious when you wake up; an escape mostly leaves you relieved to have gotten away from something.

Is a single grasshopper a sign of good luck?

A little, according to older traditions, as long as it does no damage. I'd read it more as a modest opening that caught your attention.

Ibn Sirin, or rather the later dream books published under his name, actually talks about locusts (jarad in Arabic) and reads them first as a trial. Those books still leave room for good news: a place locusts fly into without harming anything means overcoming a hardship, and eating them means money. I get a little tired of websites that promise a promotion for every green bug. In your dream, the luck is simpler than that: one grasshopper, resting, harmless, is a detail your eye picked out of the background.

Ask yourself what you've noticed lately without stopping on it: an offer mentioned in passing, an idea you jotted down and forgot, a shortcut nobody took. The dream puts it back in front of you. One caveat: if that lone grasshopper made you uneasy, luck isn't the right thread to pull. Your unease counts for more than any tradition.

Why is a swarm of grasshoppers so frightening?

Because it shows loss by accumulation: nothing serious on its own, but all together, a lot of small things eating up your time, your strength, or your savings.

The image is ancient. In Exodus, the locusts cover Egypt "so that the land was darkened," and "there remained not any green thing" (Exodus 10:15). English Bibles say locusts where French ones say sauterelles; either way, these are grasshoppers in a swarm. In the second century, Artemidorus read them as ruined crops for farmers and, for everyone else, as people who mean harm. Ibn Sirin's dream books, for their part, see an army.

I keep coming back to that locust from the start: it's the crowd that changes it. Your swarm dream often asks the same question. What has piled up in your days until it turned into a cloud? Unanswered messages, favors done out of habit, tiny expenses, commitments you agreed to one at a time. The swarm may come from outside; what the dream shows you is what it leaves behind. Look at what gets eaten: a garden, a field, the inside of your home. That's often what you're most afraid of losing.

If these dreams come back night after night and the worry spills over into your days, share it with someone close, or with a doctor or therapist. Exhaustion that gnaws at you deserves more than a cleaned-up calendar.

Did you feel tiny next to it?

This dream is almost always about size: a challenge that seems too big, or the way you see yourself in front of it.

The Bible has a scene for this. Back from Canaan, the scouts Moses sent out report seeing giants: "we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight" (Numbers 13:33). I love that "in our own sight." Before they looked small to anyone else, they had already decided they were small. If you shrank in your dream until you were knee-high to a grasshopper, look for who was playing the giant, and ask whether your size came from their eyes or from yours.

When it's the grasshopper that grows huge, two very different dreams look alike. If it scared you, it gives the scale of a decision or a change that feels out of reach. If it fascinated you, calm and almost protective, it points more to an energy in you that you're underestimating. Trust what you felt: either way, the size measures your impression, not how hard things really are.

Does a green or brown grasshopper change the meaning?

A little. Green puts it in living grass, in the middle of the season; brown ties it to dry ground and late summer.

Those colors are mainly for hiding: a green grasshopper vanishes in tall grass, a brown one on a dirt path or a dead leaf. A bright green grasshopper that stands out often comes with a time when something is growing: a project underway, a desire coming back. A brown one tends to speak of keeping a low profile, of preparation happening quietly, sometimes of weariness, like grass that waited too long for rain.

I wouldn't give color the final word. A brown grasshopper that leaps far tells you more than a green one sitting still. And don't mix it up with the praying mantis, green too, but it waits for its prey without moving. The grasshopper leaves.

What does it mean to catch or eat a grasshopper?

Catching a grasshopper means wanting to hold on to something quick and slippery. Eating one means taking in an energy, or a change, that felt foreign to you.

Anyone who tried it as a kid knows you can't keep a grasshopper in a closed fist without crushing it. If it kept getting away in your dream, think about the idea or opportunity you've been chasing for a while. If you held it gently in cupped hands, you may finally have a grip on what kept slipping through your fingers.

Eating a grasshopper is less strange than it sounds. Leviticus lists the grasshopper among the insects people may eat (Leviticus 11:22), John the Baptist lived on "locusts and wild honey" (Matthew 3:4), and in Mexico people still eat chapulines, toasted grasshoppers. In the books credited to Ibn Sirin, eating them even means a gain. If you ate with appetite, you're probably taking in something new. If it disgusted you, ask what you're being made to swallow right now.

What if you mostly heard it singing?

A dry, steady rasp in the dark often points to a small, lingering discomfort you can't quite place.

A grasshopper sings by rubbing a row of tiny pegs on its hind legs against the edge of its wings. The sound comes from friction, which makes it a good image for something that catches on you without really hurting: a remark that stuck, a relationship that creaks a little.

If it was a loud song at midday, high in the trees, you may have heard a cicada, a different insect. Artemidorus treats them separately: for him, cicadas have nothing but a voice, a sign of people who talk without doing. The mix-up is old. Aesop's fable features a cicada, and La Fontaine kept it, but English translations turned it into The Ant and the Grasshopper.

This morning, before looking any further, write down the answers to two questions: how many were there, and which way did the jump go? A grasshopper shooting straight ahead and a swarm landing on your garden aren't about the same stretch of your life. Keep those two answers for a week and watch for what in your days matches them. And if you'd like to read the rest of your dream together, write it down in Midnight Mind: I'll start from those two answers.