Dreams About Water

» left by Gregory Lewis

3 years 109 days ago.
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Hi Stephanie,

The title and subject of this article caught my attention, and some of the ideas were  surprising.

Water as a dream symbol is a subject I've spent a little time studying, in the context of Jungian psychology. If you could extract all the things Carl Jung had to say about water in all of his books, they would comprise a complete book, by itself, and a pretty thick one, at that.

As for the fish, Jung did write a book where the fish was a central theme, and that was Aion, about the Piscean Aeon or Era, of which we are at the tail end. You've heard of the Age of Aquarius? That comes next, when this aeon ends. Will there be a new prophet for the new age? Probably. Aion was one of Jung's most important works.

Here's another way of looking at water, and what it means. Water represents the unconscious. Large bodies of water represent the Collective Unconscious. That's a whole unknown universe that we, as humans, have in common, but are unable to know because of its depth. we know it's there because patterns arise from it: Hero, scoundrel, wise old man, old woman, martyr, these and all the other human archetypes. They repeat themselves through the ages, again and again.

Jung had this to say about the fish: That when one appears in your dream, it represent conscious content, an element of the thinking world. What does that mean? When a thought arises in your mind, that is conscious content. When a thought arises out of nowhere (the unconscious; the "sea"), it might be something we are afraid to face. This partially explains why dreams of large bodies of water can be frightening. We are afraid of what is in it, the unseen, the unknown, the thing we are afraid to confront. Well, the fish is that very thing that arises from the depths and presents itself. When a fish appears in your dream, it is not necessarily money, it might be something from your past, something repressed, something that was long buried but is now coming into view again. Might be good, or bad, you won't know until you look at it, and there is nothing you can do to stop it because the very fact of it rising means it will no longer be repressed.

When we see the fish rising to the surface, it often doesn't look so bad, may even be beautiful. When the unknown thing that we suppress rises to the surface, we can deal with it, overcome it.

Whether or not you consider yourself a Christian isn't required for this next part of my explanation, but Jung, who considered himself Christian (on the reason that it was a part of the tradition he grew up with, and not Buddhism, Hindu or some other tradition, and that his father was, after all, a Protestant minister) explained these also in terms of the Christian allegory, so that the fish "rising" in the water was analogous to the spirit rising, transforming into something higher than its present animal state. Hence, the fish symbolism is prevalent in the Christian myth, as in loaves-to-fish, fishers of men, the icthys (fish) symbol we see on car bumpers, and the fact that Christ was considered the centerpiece in the human world of the Piscean (Zodiacal fish) era.

Water is also the element of emotion, in terms of the four elements of Greek alchemy. So, you have turbulent, calm, deep, shallow, any metaphor related to a physical state of water can correspond to what's happening in your emotional state.

Thank you for writing.

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