Dreaming about
drowning

A drowning dream is one of the most frightening dreams to wake from, and also one of the easiest to misread as a warning. It isn't one. Dreaming about drowning usually means you feel overwhelmed, swamped by work or a feeling too big to hold, and short of air in some part of your life where you can't keep up.

What happens in the water decides the rest of the reading. Did you go under without a fight, or kick your way back to the surface? Was the water clear, dark, rough or still, and were you alone in it? Those details, and the week you had before the dream, are what turn a frightening image into something you can use.

What dreaming about drowning means

Water is one of the commonest images of feeling in our dreams (think of how often we talk about waves of emotion), and drowning is what happens when there's too much of it. English already says this in a dozen ways (drowning in paperwork, out of your depth, barely keeping your head above water). A drowning dream tends to take one of them literally. Most readings fall into one of these.

Overwhelmed by feelings

The deepest reading of a drowning dream is emotional. Grief, anger, love or fear can rise until you feel you're sinking in it, and the dream often comes when you've been holding something in for weeks. If the water felt heavy or warm, think about what you've been carrying that you haven't said out loud. And if you cried on waking, that's often the release the dream was building toward.

Too much to do

Some drowning dreams are much more practical than they feel. When your inbox, your debts or your family's needs have piled up past what you can handle, your mind reaches for the plainest picture of "I can't breathe", which is water closing over your head. And these dreams tend to cluster in busy seasons (tax time, exams, a newborn) and fade once the pressure eases.

Losing control of a situation

Drowning is also what happens when you can't touch the bottom. If the current pulled you out, or a wave came from nowhere, the dream may be about a situation that's moving without your say (a company restructuring, a relative's illness, a relationship changing shape). You can swim perfectly well, but the water is simply stronger than you right now.

Something you can't face

When you couldn't see what was below, the water can stand for what you don't yet know about yourself or a situation. Read this way, the fear is less about drowning than about what's down there, and we all have a few things we'd rather leave at the bottom.

Dreaming about drowning in water

When people search for this, they usually mean the open-water version, the sea or a lake or a river in flood. The kind of water is worth noting. A rough ocean with big waves tends to be about forces much bigger than you, while a calm lake you simply sank into is closer to exhaustion, a quiet giving up. If the water was murky, you may feel confused about what's actually going on, whereas clear water usually means you can see the problem perfectly well and still feel swamped by it.

Dreaming about saving someone from drowning

Pulling someone out of the water is one of the more hopeful drowning dreams, even if it's frightening while it lasts. It often comes when you're worried about someone in waking life (a friend who's struggling, a child going through a hard time) and want to help. But it can also be about you, since the person you save sometimes stands for a part of yourself you're trying to rescue, an old interest or a younger, more carefree version of you. If you couldn't reach them, look at what's stopping you from helping, or from asking for help yourself.

Dreaming about someone else drowning

Watching a partner, a parent or a child drown is among the hardest dreams to shake, and it is not a premonition. But dreams like this almost always track worry, the sense that someone you love is in over their head and you can't do much about it. Parents often have them about young children near water, which mirrors an ordinary daytime fear. If the person drowning is someone you've drifted from, the dream may also be about the relationship going under.

Dreaming about drowning in a car

A car going into water mixes two fears, losing control on the road and being shut in as the water rises. Since a car is how you get through your daily life, the dream often lines up with your routine going under (a job, a commute, a plan that suddenly feels like a trap). Did you get out? Then the dream may be showing you that you already know the exit, and if you were stuck behind locked doors, it's closer to dreams of being trapped.

Dreaming about being held under water

Being pushed under by someone else changes the dream entirely, because now the threat has a face. Look hard at who it was. It may be someone whose demands leave you no room to breathe, or a person you feel is keeping you down. And if you didn't recognize them, it may be a part of yourself, the harsh inner critic that never lets you come up for air.

Dreaming about breathing under water

Plenty of drowning dreams turn halfway through, as you go under and then realize you can breathe after all. This is the dream of finding out you can cope, and it often comes just as you're adapting to something that seemed impossible. Lucid dreamers know the moment well, since breathing under water is often how they notice they're dreaming in the first place.

Dreaming about drowning and waking up gasping

Sometimes a drowning dream has a plain physical side, and it's worth ruling out. A blocked nose, a duvet over your face or breathing that pauses during the night can all reach the dreaming brain as water closing over you. If you often wake up gasping or choking, or someone has told you that you stop breathing in your sleep, it's worth mentioning to a doctor, whatever the dream looked like.

Dreaming about drowning according to Jung and Freud

Water has a long history in dream thinking, even if neither of the big names wrote much about drowning dreams as such.

Jung: water as the unconscious

For Jung, no image stood for the unconscious more often than water, the part of the mind that sits below the surface.^[1] Read through that idea, drowning is what happens when what's down there rises faster than you can deal with it, when feelings, memories or instincts you've kept out of sight flood your waking attitude.

Freud: falling into water as birth

Freud saw water dreams very differently from Jung, and much more literally. He read falling into water and climbing out of it as pictures of birth,^[2] which makes a dream of being pulled from the water, gasping, an image of coming into the world. It's a reading few people find useful today, but it does leave room for a dream of almost drowning to be a dream of starting over.

Other readings

Ernest Hartmann, a psychiatrist at Tufts in the United States, spent his career on nightmares and dreams after trauma and kept hearing about a huge wave sweeping the dreamer away from people who had just been through something terrible, whether an attack, a fire or a death.^[3] The wave didn't replay what happened. In his reading it pictured the feeling, "I am terrified. I am overwhelmed." One of his cases, a 14-year-old boy accidentally locked in a hotel room for a day and a half, dreamed for months of being locked in and of drowning in a tidal wave. A drowning dream is a close cousin of that image, and the plainest reading of it is the same feeling (our application of his idea, not his own words).

The biblical and spiritual meaning of drowning in dreams

Deep water is an old picture of being overwhelmed, and both the Bible and the Agni Purana use it that way.

Deep water in the Bible

Deep water is one of the Bible's pictures of despair. A psalm opens on "Save me, O God; for the waters are come in unto my soul",^[4] and when Peter begins to sink on the lake, Jesus reaches out and catches him.^[5] In both, the person going under is pulled out, which is often the shape of drowning dreams too.

Drowning in the Agni Purana

A whole chapter of the Agni Purana, a Sanskrit text, is given to good and bad dreams, and it lists drowning in a river among the bad ones.^[6] Its lists are full of reversals, though, and count your own death and a burning house among the good omens.

Questions to ask about your drowning dream

The same dream of going under can mean very different things depending on what surrounded it. These questions are a good place to start.

• What kind of water was it, and how did you end up in it?
• Did you fight, give up, or find you could breathe?
• Was anyone there, trying to help or holding you down?
• What in your life feels like too much right now?
• Did you wake up gasping, or with your heart racing?

Oniri goes through this kind of question with you before reading your dream. But if you're having drowning nightmares several times a week and dreading going to bed, talk to a doctor, and read up on how to have fewer nightmares in the meantime.