Dreaming about
a lake

A lake is water that has stopped moving, held in by land on every side, and its surface tells you almost nothing about what's under it. "Still waters run deep" says that about people, and dreaming about a lake usually says it about you: the lake reflects your inner state, calm and clear when you feel settled, murky or rough when something is stirring below the surface.

So the water itself is the first thing to look at. A glassy lake at dawn is a different dream from a black one at night, or a frozen one creaking underfoot. What you were doing, swimming, sailing, standing on the shore, and how you felt about the depth are the details that decide what your lake means.

What dreaming about a lake means

Lakes are calmer than the ocean and deeper than they look, so lake dreams tend to be about the quieter, more private side of your feelings.

Your emotional weather

A lake mirrors the sky above it, and in a dream it often mirrors your mood. A calm, clear lake can reflect peace after a hard time, or a wish for it. Choppy or stormy water suggests emotions that have been stirred up, a row, a worry, news you're still taking in.

What's under the surface

Every lake has a bottom you can't see, and dreams like to put something down there. A shape moving under the water, a feeling of being watched from below or a lake you're afraid to swim in can all point to feelings you're aware of but haven't looked at, an old grief, a fear, a want you keep to yourself.

A place to reflect

Lakes are where people go to be quiet, a cabin weekend, a walk around the shore. A peaceful lake dream can be about needing that stillness, or about a time of reflection you're already in.

Dreaming about swimming in a lake

Swimming in a lake is moving through your feelings. If the water was warm and clear, the dream is often about ease, being comfortable with what you feel. If it was cold, deep or full of weeds that caught your legs, it's about emotions that are harder to move through. Swimming out too far and struggling to get back is about being in over your head, in a relationship or a commitment.

Dreaming about a frozen lake

A frozen lake is feeling that has been shut down, held still under a hard surface. Walking out on the ice can be about a risk you're taking with emotions you've kept frozen, and the ice cracking is the fear that they'll break through. Skating happily on it, though, can be a dream about keeping your balance through a hard season.

Dreaming about drowning in a lake

Going under in a lake is a frightening dream about being overwhelmed, usually by feelings, sometimes by circumstances. It shares a lot with drowning dreams in general, and the lake adds the sense that the trouble is close to home, quiet and private more than big and public. If someone pulled you out, notice who.

Dreaming about a clear or a murky lake

Clear water you can see to the bottom of usually reflects clarity, knowing where you stand or what you feel. Murky, muddy or dark water reflects confusion, trouble or a mind that isn't clear. A lake that went from clear to murky during the dream may point to a situation that started simple and got complicated.

Dreaming about a lake according to Jung and Freud

A lake is water that stays put, which suits one man's theory of the unconscious and another's of where we began.

Jung: still water and the unconscious

Jung named still waters among the images of the mother archetype, and wrote that of all symbols of the unconscious, water is the commonest.^[1] A lake is about the purest form of both, deep water held and contained, which is why going into one in a dream can feel like going into yourself.

Freud: falling in and climbing out

In Freud's account a dream can say birth with water, by a fall in or a climb out.^[2] A lake is water you can do both with, so a plunge and a rescue is, in his terms, likely to be about where you came from, and he'd want to know who pulled you out. He didn't write about lakes, and the birth reading is only one of the things a plunge can be.

Other readings

Edgar Cayce, the American psychic who gave hundreds of dream readings from a trance, took water as a picture of the spirit and the unconscious, and muddy water as trouble or a mind that isn't clear.^[3]

The spiritual meaning of a lake in dreams

Pools in the Upanishads

In the dream state, the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad holds, nothing is really there, no roads, no pools, no rivers, because the dreamer is the one who makes them.^[4] The text is a Sanskrit work on the nature of the self, and in its picture the lake you swam in was built by you for the night.

Questions to ask about your lake dream

The surface of a lake tells you less than what's underneath, so these questions go both places.

• Was the water clear, murky, rough or frozen?
• Were you in it, on it, or watching from the shore?
• Did anything move under the surface?
• What feeling have you been keeping still lately?

Oniri asks about details of this sort before reading your dream, because a lake at peace and a lake hiding something lead to very different answers.