Drowning

In the interpretation of dreams, Drowning is among the recurring images that traditional dream-books and modern depth psychology have alike tried to read. It is commonly interpreted as being overwhelmed, submerged by emotion, or losing oneself.

Common readings

Drowning is read as being overwhelmed, most often by feeling, or as a fear of losing oneself in a situation that has risen over the dreamer's head.

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

The dream's hinge is whether breath fails. Struggling on the surface, being pulled under, sinking calmly and breathing underwater after all are four distinct endings, and the last, reported surprisingly often, is generally read as the discovery that the feared element can be survived. Who else is present matters: drowning alone, drowning while others watch unmoved, and being rescued are read as three different statements about help. The water itself, clear, dark, cold or warm, sets the character of what the dreamer is sinking into.

Drowning dreams sit closer to physiology than almost any other image, and the honest entry says so first. Sleep medicine documents that disordered breathing in sleep, apnoea above all, can surface in dreams as suffocation, choking and drowning, the labouring body supplying the plot; a recurring drowning dream is one of the few dream patterns for which a medical question, does the sleeper stop breathing, is a genuinely useful first response. No symbolism should be read until that layer has been considered.

Where breath is not the issue, the traditions take over. The old handbooks read drowning toward ruin, being over one's head in the exact sense the idiom preserves, and the folk dictionaries followed with losses, debts and entanglements closing over the dreamer. Psychoanalysis, reading water as the element of the earliest life, took sinking and rescue from water into its account of birth imagery, a reading that belongs to that theory.

The modern composite reads drowning as the extremity of the water dreams: not sadness but submersion, the point where feeling or circumstance stops being something the dreamer is in and becomes something the dreamer is under. Interpreters attend to the dream's ending, rescue, landfall, sinking, or the strange discovery that breathing underwater is possible after all, that last turn being widely reported and generally read as the dream's own answer, the feared element proving survivable.