DreamloreDream dictionary › Common dreams › Water or Drowning
What does it mean to dream about water or drowning?
Clear or muddy, rising or calm, water is one of the most frequent images in dreams, and drowning one of the most frightening. Here is what the old books say, quoted exactly.
What Miller wrote (1901)
To dream of clear water, foretells that you will joyfully realize prosperity and pleasure. If the water is muddy, you will be in danger and gloom will occupy Pleasure's seat.
Read the full entry for “Water” →
To dream of drowning, denotes loss of property and life; but if you are rescued, you will rise from your present position to one of wealth and honor. To see others drowning, and you go to their relief, signifies that you will aid your friend to high places, and will bring deserved happiness to yourself.
Read the full entry for “Drowning” →
What Freud wrote
Freud, on dreams of going into water:
In dreams as in mythology, the delivery of a child from the uterine waters is commonly presented by distortion as the entry of the child into water; among many others, the births of Adonis, Osiris, Moses, and Bacchus are well-known illustrations of this.
Your dream is not a dictionary entry
A dream about water or drowning comes with a place, other people and a feeling, and the old books read the same image very differently depending on those details. Dreamlore takes your whole dream, spoken or typed, finds the passages that fit it in Miller and Freud, quotes them word for word, and leaves you one question to reflect on. The journal stays on your phone.
Read your own dream in DreamloreFull dictionary entries
Questions
What does it mean to dream about water or drowning?
Miller's 1901 dictionary contrasts clear water, read as prosperity and pleasure, with muddy water, read as danger and gloom. For drowning he reads loss, unless you are rescued. Freud wrote that in dreams, as in mythology, entering water can stand for birth. These are old readings to reflect on, not facts about your dream.
Where do these quotes come from?
They are quoted verbatim from public-domain books: Gustavus Hindman Miller's Ten Thousand Dreams Interpreted (1901) and Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (translated by A. A. Brill, 1913). Each quote on this page is checked word for word against the source text before the page is served, the same check the Dreamlore app runs on every quote it shows.
Other common dreams
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Dreamlore and these pages are for reflection and curiosity. The books quoted here are old — Miller wrote in 1901 and his entries read as omens, and many of Freud's ideas are disputed today. Take them as a starting point for thinking about your own dream, not as prediction or advice.