What does it mean to dream about water?
Water in a dream often mirrors your emotions and the unconscious: calm water tends toward peace, rough or rising water toward feeling overwhelmed.
Four ways to 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.
Freud
Freud read water in dreams as bound up with birth and the body. Emerging from water, or rescuing someone from it, often pointed back to being born; immersion could carry the wish to return to an earlier, sheltered state. The feeling of the water, calm or engulfing, colored which way the image leaned.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.Jung
For Jung, water is the most common image of the unconscious itself: the deep, moving source from which conscious life rises. Still water can mirror the self; turbulent or flooding water can mean the unconscious overwhelming the waking mind. Diving in is often a movement toward what has been hidden.
Jungian concept (our summary).Modern
Cognitive readings treat water as an emotional barometer drawn from waking concerns: smooth water tends to accompany calm dreams, rough or rising water accompanies stress. The continuity hypothesis suggests the dream reuses water to picture how a feeling is moving, gently or out of control.
Continuity hypothesis (our summary).Mythological
Across cultures water is the threshold between worlds and the source of life: the primordial waters of Genesis and Babylonian myth, the Greek rivers of the underworld, holy wells and rivers of Celtic and Hindu tradition. To classical dream readers, clear flowing water was generally favorable, muddy or violent water a warning.
Artemidorus; Bulfinch; Miller (1901).