Dreaming about
a swimming pool

A swimming pool is water that has been tamed. It has walls, a painted line on the bottom, numbers telling you how deep it is and, often, a lifeguard in a high chair watching everyone. Dreaming about a swimming pool is usually about your feelings in that kind of safe, contained form, or about rest and play you've been missing. Where the ocean is too big to see the end of, a pool is something you can swim across.

The state of the pool and what you did in it change the reading. Lazy lengths in clear blue water are not the dream of an empty pool with cracked tiles, and being pushed in fully dressed is a dream of its own. Then there's your own history with pools, since someone who swam competitively and someone who never learned will read the same deep end very differently.

What dreaming about a swimming pool means

Most of us met the pool as children, in swimming lessons that smelled of chlorine (and of other children's crisps afterwards), and a lot of pool dreams still carry that mix of fun and nerves. Four readings come up again and again.

Feelings with edges

A pool is feeling you can manage, the water of dreams with a fence around it. You know where the sides are and you can stand up in the shallow end. A pool dream often comes when you're dealing with something emotional in a controlled way (therapy, a careful conversation, grief you've made room for) rather than being swept away by it.

Time off

Pools mean summer, holidays and hotels for most people, and plenty of pool dreams are simply a wish for a break. If you were lying on a lounger or floating with your eyes shut, ask when you last had a day with nothing in it. A week? A year? Longer than you'd like to admit? It's common to dream this way in the middle of a long working stretch, and the dream can be oddly vivid about the sun and the smell of sunscreen.

Being seen

At a public pool you're nearly undressed in front of strangers, which is why changing rooms and swimsuits can make even confident people shy. A pool dream where you felt watched or exposed sits close to the classic naked dream. It tends to come when you're worried about being judged on your body, your work or how you come across.

Old lessons

Pool dreams often go back to childhood, to the instructor shouting from the side, the first time you swam without armbands, or the day you were made to jump off the high board. When one of these comes back now, look at where you're learning something new as an adult and feel like a beginner again.

Dreaming about swimming in a pool

Swimming in a pool is the most common version, and how easy it felt is the reading. Strong, smooth lengths point to confidence, a sense that you can handle what you're feeling. But if you were struggling, swallowing water or unable to reach the side, something that should feel manageable doesn't. And swimming lengths over and over, never getting anywhere, can mean you're in a routine that keeps you busy without taking you forward.

Dreaming about an empty swimming pool

A pool with no water in it is one of the most unsettling pool dreams, because it's a place made for something that isn't there. It often points to a gap, like a relationship that has gone flat, energy that has run out, or a part of your life you've emptied of feeling to get through a hard time. Standing at the bottom of an empty deep end is a picture of being exposed and stuck at once. Jumping into one, and waking before you hit, is about a risk taken on something that can't hold you.

Dreaming about a dirty swimming pool

Green water, leaves on the surface, or things floating that shouldn't be: a dirty pool is about something that was meant to be clean and safe and isn't anymore. That might be a friendship that has turned sour, a workplace with bad feeling in it, or your own mood after a stretch of stress. If you got in anyway, ask what you're putting up with that you'd rather not.

Dreaming about the deep end

Being "thrown in at the deep end" means having to cope with something hard and new without preparation, and the dream often means just that. A new job, a new baby or a sudden responsibility can all turn into a deep end you can't touch the bottom of, and English has a few more pool sayings (testing the water, diving in head first) that may fit your week too. If you swam, you're coping better than you think. But if you sank or panicked, the pressure is real, and it's worth asking for help. Dreams of drowning in a pool, of all places, often come when you're struggling in a situation that looks easy to everyone else.

Dreaming about falling or being pushed into a pool

Falling in by accident is about being caught off guard by a feeling, but being pushed in is about someone else putting you there, a person who dropped a problem in your lap or forced a conversation you weren't ready for. Going in with your clothes on adds embarrassment, especially if people were watching. How you came up matters most, laughing or furious.

Dreaming about a crowded swimming pool

A pool packed with people, where you can't swim a stroke without bumping into someone, is about having no room for yourself. It's common when work, family or a busy social life leaves no space for your own feelings. And if the crowd left and you had the water to yourself, that's what you're wishing for.

Dreaming about a swimming pool according to Jung and Freud

Both men's ideas come at a pool through the water in it, and what follows applies them, said as such.

Jung on swimming pools: water with a fence around it

Jung saw water as the commonest picture of the unconscious in dreams.^[2] A pool, read through his idea, is the unconscious fenced off and made safe, with a ladder in and a ladder out. That leads to a fair question. Are you ready to go out into wilder water, or is the pool where you need to be for now?

Freud on swimming pools: coming up out of the water

Freud's symbol list gives birth as a scene with water in it: you fall in, or you climb out.^[3] Applied to a pool, being pushed in and climbing out by the ladder has exactly that shape, and the first place his idea points is a pregnancy, a baby or a fresh start of your own. The public pool brings in a second idea of his. He described a typical dream where you stand undressed among strangers and nobody else minds, and a pool full of people in swimsuits is that dream with a reason.

The spiritual meaning of a swimming pool in dreams

One of the oldest Hindu texts on dreams mentions pools by name, and its point is philosophical.

The pool in the Upanishads

Among the oldest Upanishads, the Brihadaranyaka describes the dream state as a place where the dreamer builds the whole scene: there are no chariots, roads, pools or rivers in it, and he makes each one himself, "for he is the agent".^[4] That is a claim about who builds the pool in your dream, and it makes the details (the water's color, how deep it was, who stood at the edge) yours.

Questions to ask about your swimming pool dream

Dreams borrow freely from what we did yesterday,^[1] so if you swam that day, start there. If not, these questions help.

• Was the pool clear, dirty, empty or overflowing?
• Were you swimming, floating, sinking or watching from the side?
• Was it a pool you know, from childhood, a holiday or a hotel?
• Who else was there, and did you feel watched?
• Where in your life do you feel out of your depth, or in need of a break?

Describe your pool to Oniri and it asks you questions in this vein before it offers a reading.