Drowning in a dream

Where the overwhelm reading comes from

It comes from water, and water has one of the longest histories in the study of dreams. Jung wrote that water is the commonest symbol for the unconscious, and he meant the lake in the valley, the sea, the flood, the deep dark, the living stuff that your consciousness bobs on top of and does not control. The reading follows on from there, I think. If water is the unconscious, then going under is the moment you stop looking at it and find yourself in it.

That is the Jungian root of the reading, or so I think. My guess is the dictionaries took it and shortened it to overwhelm, which is fair as far as it goes.

The older traditions put it differently. In the dream book attributed to Ibn Sirin, and the attribution itself is disputed, drowning is usually read as being swallowed by the affairs of this world, which is the same shape of idea pointed at the world rather than at feeling. The old paperback dream books, which I file under folklore, and Miller's 10,000 Dreams Interpreted from 1901 is the one most of them copied as far as I can tell, warned that to dream of drowning foretold a loss of property and life, and that to be rescued foretold a rise to wealth and honour. Nobody I know has tested this and I would not bother.

“No dream symbol can be separated from the individual who dreams it, and there is no definite or straightforward interpretation of any dream.”

C.G. Jung, Approaching the Unconscious, in Man and His Symbols (1964)

My own water, for what it is worth

A while ago I dreamt of a big alpine lake. I am there with my brother and a few friends, watching the lake from the hillside, and one of my good friends is swimming in it, pushing a mechanical diving suit across the surface. Then a crocodile comes at him from one side and an orca from the other, and I think the crocodile gets him and perhaps the orca was trying to stop that happening, and he does not come back up. My brother and I jump in to look for him and find only the suit. At the end of the dream we get the call that he has died, and I break down in tears.

When I worked it through, what the dream was showing me was that when one swims freely out over the unconscious waters they may find themselves at the peril of the instinctual forces that dwell beneath them. My friend, in the dream, was the part of me that tries to think its way across the water without ever going in, and it was not overwhelm that took him. That part of me had trained himself to feel less, and what met him in the water was a creature that has never known how to feel in the first place. Then the grief came, and I think the grief was what the dream had been promising all along, the pendulum swinging back towards feeling and the orca.

Your lake is not my lake, and I only tell you this because "overwhelmed" would have been a fair reading of that dream and it would have got me nowhere.

Three dreamers, one drowning

Let me make up three people, since I cannot tell you about real ones.

The first has a new baby and has not slept properly in four months. She dreams she is drowning in a bath, and her first association for the bath is the ten minutes a day that used to be hers, so the dream is about the one place she had to breathe, and the water has got into it.

The second is a strong swimmer who lost a friend to the sea as a teenager. He dreams he is drowning and is not frightened. His first association is the friend, and then a strange calm comes over him, and I would want to sit with him on that calm for a while before anyone said the word overwhelm, because the dream seems to be holding something about surrender that the stock reading does not touch, and only he can say what.

The third dreams she is standing on a jetty watching her brother drown and cannot move. Her first association is a phone call she has been putting off for three weeks to her brother that is struggling with his mental health, and so the dream was pointing to her own inaction.

Three people in the same water, and the dictionary gets each of them into the right ballpark, which is right about where it leaves them.

Before you look anything up

A fixed symbol dictionary treats a dream image like a word in a foreign language. You look it up and you get the translation. A dream image behaves more like a name than a word. If I tell you my mother's name, a dictionary is useless to you, because the meaning sits in the relationship.

So before you take the overwhelm reading, ask the dream its own questions. Ask what water it was, a bath, a pool, the sea, a flood in your own house, because those are different waters and your associations for each will be different. Ask who was there, and whether you fought or let go. Then ask where the dream stopped. A dream that ends with you going under has told you something by refusing to show the surface. Then look at where all of that lands in your life this week, because even if the dictionary is right that something is over your head, it cannot tell you which water that is, and you are the only one who was in it.

If the water is not only in the dream

I want to say one more thing here, because this dream deserves it. A drowning dream can come when life is genuinely too much, and if that is where you are, the dream is not the thing to work on first. If a feeling is heavy or will not shift, talk to a doctor or therapist too. Dreamwork sits alongside that, never instead of it, and the dream will still be there when you are ready to look at it.

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