Dream symbols · Weather · The Unconscious

Flood

The unconscious arriving faster than it can be met. Water is the standing image for feeling and for what is not conscious, so a flood is not simply loss: it is that material entering the ordinary rooms of a life. The tradition is consistent that a flood clears as well as destroys, and that what it leaves behind is the reading.

Where the reading comes from

Every flood myth in the record carries the same double meaning, ending in survival and a new covenant rather than in the water. Jung took the rising water dream as one of the clearest signals that unconscious content was close to the surface.

Versions of the dream

Rising slowly

Slow water is the version that shows up during a long change rather than a sudden one.

A wall of it

A wave or a sudden break tends to accompany news, an event, or something learned all at once.

Clear water

Clean floodwater reads differently from muddy, and the dreamer usually remembers which it was.

Standing after

Water that has stopped rising and simply sits is the stagnation form, and it asks a different question.