In the interpretation of dreams, Ocean is among the recurring images that traditional dream-books and modern depth psychology have alike tried to read. It is commonly interpreted as the vast unconscious, the collective depths, or emotions too large to contain.
Common readings
In depth-psychology readings large bodies of water often stand for the unconscious, and the state of the sea, calm or storm-tossed, is read as the state of the dreamer's feeling life.
The reading of dream symbols has a long documented history, from the Oneirocritica of Artemidorus in the second century to Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and the archetypal psychology of C. G. Jung. Such meanings are interpretive conventions of those traditions, offered here as ways the image has been understood rather than as fixed or established fact; in practice a symbol takes much of its sense from the individual dreamer and the setting of the dream.
What changes the reading
Interpreters of every school agree that the state of the dream sea matters more than the sea itself. A calm ocean crossed safely, a storm survived, a shore never reached and a deep that pulls the dreamer under are treated as four different dreams, and the dreamer's own relation to water in waking life, sailor, swimmer or someone who fears it, shifts the sense again. The scale of the image is usually taken seriously: an ocean is not a pond, and readings that fit a contained feeling are not stretched to cover a limitless one.