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Dreams about water and floods
Rising water often accompanies feeling overwhelmed.
Water appears in dreams in every form: calm seas, rain, rising floods. Many people describe flood dreams in overwhelming periods of life. There is no fixed meaning. The kinder question is what the dream felt like and whether you would like to change it.
Can a dream symbol mean something?
Dream dictionaries give fixed meanings, but research does not support them. What dreams do seem to carry is feeling: the continuity hypothesis suggests they borrow worries, memories and moods from waking life.
So the useful question is not “what does it mean?” but “how did it feel, and does that feeling remind me of anything right now?” And no dream predicts the future.
If this dream keeps coming back
- Write it down in the morning, in a few lines, including how it felt.
- Choose the moment where you would like it to turn. You don’t need to relive the whole dream.
- Write a new ending and rehearse it for about ten minutes a day for a week. This is imagery rehearsal, the method sleep medicine recommends for recurring nightmares.
Sources
- Domhoff, The scientific study of dreams, 2003
Evidence label: Exploratory. What the labels mean.
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