Dreaming About Water

Water appears in more dreams than almost any other single image, which on its own explains the pages the old dream books devote to it. The reading that has lasted longest treats the condition of the water as a portrait of feeling: clear and still for emotion that has settled, churned or clouded for emotion the dreamer has not yet sorted through. The water is a mirror in this system, not an event.

Clarity, depth and movement

In these interpretations the water itself is close to neutral. Everything hangs on the details dreamers tend to remember anyway.

• Clear water. Associated with situations the dreamer can see the bottom of, and with feelings they could describe out loud if asked.
• Muddy or dark water. Understood as confusion, or as something known perfectly well and not looked at directly.
• Rising water. Linked with a sense of pressure accumulating in waking life, rather than with any outside event.
• Still water the dreamer stands beside. Taken as reflection: the pause in a situation rather than the crisis in it.

Notice that not one of these is a prediction. They are ways of describing a mood back to the person who was already carrying it.

The unremarkable explanations

Plenty of water dreams have causes that no symbolic system needs to argue with. People who go to bed thirsty, who sleep in an overheated room, or who need the bathroom frequently report watery imagery. So do people who spent the afternoon in a pool or the evening listening to rain against the glass. If you dreamt of the sea the night after a day at the coast, the day at the coast is a perfectly respectable answer.

Your own history with it

Somebody who swims every morning meets water in sleep as familiar company. Somebody who nearly drowned as a child meets something else entirely, and that private history sets the tone long before any dictionary gets a word in. It is worth adding that water carries different weight in different places: where it is scarce it reads as relief and wealth, where flooding is a seasonal danger it reads as threat. Both traditions are genuine and neither is the universal one.