Polar night
A night that lasts for months in the high latitudes — a long darkness that is part of the place itself.
A polar night in a dream is the dream's image of a darkness that is not weather and not mood — it is a structural feature of the place itself, lasting weeks or months because the geometry of the world is what it is. The dream brings polar night when something in your life — a long depression, a season of an industry, a phase of a marriage — is dark not because of anything that recently went wrong but because the place you are standing on has tilted away from the sun for a known stretch. A polar night accepted, with the lamps lit and the household carrying on at small scale, is the dream affirming the right response to the structural dark. A polar night fought as if it were ordinary weather, with constant rage at the missing sun, is the dream noting that the darkness is not personal and the fight against it is now itself the source of the exhaustion.