In January the list was ready. The course you were going to start, the job change, the trip with your friends, the talk with your business partner about the year ahead. February arrives and something on that list starts asking to be fixed: the course changes dates, your partner asks for one more week, the friend who had agreed to the trip is no longer sure.

On the other side, the opposite movement shows up. An old dream, one you had filed away as belonging to a different phase, comes back to occupy your mind in the middle of a shower. An idea that seemed silly in December now seems like the only one that makes sense.

That is the mood of the first Mercury retrograde of 2027. It turns retrograde from 9 February, at 2:35pm, until 3 March, at 9:38am, Brasília time, and makes this backward journey between two signs: it stations at 5°58' Pisces and picks up forward motion again at 20°55' Aquarius. Pisces is what you dream. Aquarius is what you plan for the future. The weeks ahead call for a second look at both.

Every retrograde has an outward leg, a return, and a second pass through the same stretch of sky. The dates below cover all three, in Brasília time, and come from the same ephemeris the site uses to build charts.

• 25 January 2027: the shadow opens. Mercury passes through 20°55' Aquarius, the degree where it will stop moving backward in March.
• 31 January: Mercury enters Pisces.
• 9 February, 2:35pm: retrograde station, at 5°58' Pisces. Mercury stops and starts moving backward.
• 18 February: conjunction with the Sun, at 29°47' Aquarius, the midpoint of the cycle. On the same day, Mercury moves back into Aquarius.
• 3 March, 9:38am: direct station, at 20°55' Aquarius. Mercury starts moving forward again.
• 18 March: Mercury enters Pisces again.
• 23 March: the shadow closes, when it passes once more through the degree where it stationed in February.

In practice, the matter you started stirring up in late January tends to come back in mid-February to be worked through again, and usually only settles after 23 March.

The period begins three days after the annular solar eclipse of 6 February, which falls in Aquarius. The eclipse marks a beginning. Mercury, right after, asks you to review the plan behind that beginning before rushing off with it.

I like this order. Anyone who feels the urge to flip the table at the start of February gets, as a bonus, three weeks to check whether the new table fits in the room. The idea still stands; what eases off is the rush.

And then there is the pair of signs. Pisces looks inward: the dream, the intuition, what you want without being able to explain it. Aquarius looks ahead: the group, the technology, the different way of doing things. Between the two, the question these weeks bring is whether what you are planning still connects to what you dream. Sometimes it does. Sometimes the plan got so practical it forgot why it existed in the first place.

No planet actually moves backward. Seen from Earth, Mercury appears to move back against the background of stars because the two orbits run at different speeds, and astrology reads this stretch as a phase of review: revisit, pick back up, redo. The piece on what a retrograde planet is shows how much time each planet spends this way.

The whole mechanism, the shadow and the four dates through the end of 2027, are in the general piece on Mercury retrograde. Here what matters is something else: which part of your life this specific period affects.

The sign shows the theme in the sky. The house in your chart shows which area of your life it plays out in. To find yours, generate the site's free birth chart with your birth date, time and city. The exact time makes a difference: two hours off can change the house entirely.

On the wheel, look for the symbols for Pisces (♓) and Aquarius (♒) on the outer ring. The number of the house occupying that stretch is the area affected. If the two signs fall in different houses, both come into play: the Aquarius one usually shows the plan, and the Pisces one, the dream behind it. What each house holds is explained in what an astrological house is.

• House 1: the image you wanted to project this year goes back to the drawing board, from your haircut to how you present yourself in a meeting.
• House 2: January's budget gets reworked, and the big purchase you had already decided on gets a second round of price comparisons.
• House 3: the message to your brother, the note to the school, the text in the building's group chat all call for a reread before you hit send.
• House 4: the renovation, the move, or the talk with your parents about their future comes back to the kitchen table.
• House 5: the abandoned creative project resurfaces, or an old flame sends a “hey, stranger”.
• House 6: the routine you set up in January needs adjusting, and the exam you kept putting off needs booking.
• House 7: the agreement with your partner or business partner gets reread, item by item, and someone realises they understood something different.
• House 8: debt, inheritance, a joint account and that difficult conversation about intimacy come back to be sorted out.
• House 9: the trip, the exchange programme or the postgraduate course gets replanned, and sometimes the destination changes.
• House 10: your career plan for the year gets checked over again, and an offer you had turned down might come back.
• House 11: the friend group or the team project revisits who does what, and someone who had disappeared shows back up.
• House 12: what you have been keeping to yourself asks for attention, night dreams get more vivid, and rest stops being optional.

What pays off in this period is returning to what already exists. Finish the piece sitting in your drafts, pick up the conversation that stalled halfway, reread the proposal carefully before signing. If January's plan had loose ends, February is the month to tie them up.

Launching something new in a hurry tends to need extra care: the announcement, the launch, the website. It can happen, and it almost always needs adjusting afterwards. If you can wait until 3 March, or better still until 23 March, the adjustment comes out cheaper.

And with Pisces in the middle of the picture, it is worth jotting down the dreams and loose ideas that come to you, even just in your phone's notes app. Some will look silly by April. One or two will turn out to be exactly the missing piece of the plan.

Retrograde is not bad luck or punishment. Mercury spends roughly a fifth of its time this way, and life keeps going through that fifth. Nobody needs to cancel a surgery, a wedding or a contract on their own because of these dates: if it has a deadline, the deadline stands.

The general sky describes a mood that applies to everyone at the same time. What happens in your life depends on your chart, on the house this sky falls in, and, above all, on what you do with the week. Those who use the period to reread and talk things through usually come out of it with a firmer plan.

Take the list of plans you made for 2027, or write one now, no need to make it tidy. Next to each item, note the dream it serves: why you want that thing. If you cannot answer, mark the item with a question mark.

The marked items are the candidates for February's review. Reviewing can mean crossing something out, changing the date, or just remembering the reason you had forgotten. When the shadow closes, on 23 March, compare the new list with January's. The difference between the two usually says a lot about the house in your chart where Pisces and Aquarius live.

And the questions that come up most on this subject, with the short answer: