Mineral water in a dream: what does it mean?
Water sold on the strength of what is dissolved in it, which is the entire basis of an industry and of several towns.
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 took the waters himself, as did most of his profession and patients, and a great deal of nineteenth-century European psychiatry happened in spa towns. He would treat the setting as ordinary rather than remarkable.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might take water credited with healing as an example of belief doing work the chemistry cannot, and would be interested rather than dismissive about that.
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?
Thirst during sleep is genuinely incorporated into dream content and is one of the better documented cases of a bodily state producing a specific image. Water that cannot be drunk or reached is the usual form it takes.
Our summary of the incorporation literature. See Schredl and Hofmann, Continuity between waking activities and dream activities (2003).What do myth and folklore say?
Spa towns from Bath to Baden were built on the claim, and the sulphurous ones smelled so bad that drinking the water was treated as proof of seriousness. Taking a cure was a social season as much as a medical act. The pump room at Bath ran to a timetable and the drinking was scheduled, supervised and charged for.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Brewer).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?
The smell is the fact that makes a spa scene real. The famous waters are frequently disgusting and everybody drinks them anyway.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The cure that works because it is unpleasant.
What are the genre conventions?
A pump room, a doctor, and a convalescent with a secret.
How to subvert it
Write the bottling plant, and the marketing meeting about the label.
Try this
Two hundred words about drinking something foul on purpose. Everybody present is pretending it is pleasant.
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.
-
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.
-
Man and His Symbols
The accessible Jung, and the honest place to start for the archetype material our Jung readings summarise.
Rosmerta Publishing is a member of the Bookshop.org and Amazon Associates affiliate programs. If you buy a book through these links we may earn a small commission, at no extra cost to you. The public-domain texts are always free to read online.