Wading in a dream: what does it mean?
Walking into water, where each step is slower than the last and turning back gets harder the further you go.
How do the four traditions read it?
Each reading below comes from a named tradition and a cited source, so you can see where it came from and decide what fits your dream. The four often disagree, and that is the point: a symbol rarely means one fixed thing, and the distance between Freud, Jung, modern research and myth tells you more than any single verdict could.
How did Freud read this symbol?
Freud would attend to the graduated commitment. Entering something a step at a time makes each individual step reasonable, and he would ask how far in the dreamer had got by small decisions.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that the resistance increases with depth. The medium pushes back harder the more of the body is in it, so the difficulty rises exactly as the option of stopping falls away.
Our summary of a Jungian reading, in our own words, not Jung's. See Jung, ed., Man and His Symbols (1964).What does modern dream research say?
Water settings recur in dream reports, and content analysis finds deep or rising water among the more frequently reported frightening features in the situations dreamers describe.
Our summary of the content-analysis findings. See Hall and Van de Castle, The Content Analysis of Dreams (1966).What do myth and folklore say?
Fords were judged by whether a person could stand in the current rather than by depth alone, since moving water takes a walker off their feet well before it is deep enough to swim.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.How can writers use this symbol?
The same symbol, read as craft material rather than as a dream. What it does on the page, how genres use it differently, and what happens when you turn it inside out. Written for novelists, screenwriters and poets who need the symbol to actually work, and it ends with something to try.
Where does this appear in literature?
Moving water takes you off your feet long before it is deep enough to swim in. Depth is not the measure.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
Committed by a series of individually reasonable steps.
What are the genre conventions?
Water at the knee, then the thigh, and a bank behind you.
How to subvert it
Write turning back.
Try this
Two hundred words about getting a long way into something through a sequence of small sensible decisions.
Only the first of these names a source. What a symbol does in a story, how genres treat it, how to invert it and what to try are our editorial judgement as writers and editors, not findings from a body of research. They are offered as craft opinion and should be argued with.
The books behind these readings
These are the books this entry actually draws on, not a general reading list. Where a text is in the public domain we link the free copy first, because you should not have to pay for something you can read for nothing. Every edition listed has been checked to exist and to be the right one.
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The Interpretation of Dreams
The source behind every Freud reading in the dictionary. This is the 1913 Brill translation we adapt from, and it is free to read online.
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Man and His Symbols
The accessible Jung, and the honest place to start for the archetype material our Jung readings summarise.
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