Flood

In the interpretation of dreams, Flood is among the recurring images that traditional dream-books and modern depth psychology have alike tried to read. It is commonly interpreted as being overwhelmed by emotion, a sweeping and unstoppable change.

Common readings

The flood is read as emotion or circumstance rising beyond control, a sweeping change that overwhelms the ordinary structures of the dreamer's life.

The reading of dream symbols has a long documented history, from the Oneirocritica of Artemidorus in the second century to Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and the archetypal psychology of C. G. Jung. Such meanings are interpretive conventions of those traditions, offered here as ways the image has been understood rather than as fixed or established fact; in practice a symbol takes much of its sense from the individual dreamer and the setting of the dream.

What changes the reading

Interpreters ask where the water comes from and what it reaches. A river over its banks, a sea that keeps rising, a burst dam and water entering the dreamer's own house are different dreams, the last read most personally, as the overwhelm arriving where the dreamer lives. Whether the dreamer flees, climbs, floats or is carried matters as much as the flood itself, since being borne by the water and being buried by it are opposite fates inside the same image. Water that recedes before the dream ends is usually allowed to soften the whole reading.

In the autumn of 1913 Jung was overtaken, while travelling, by a repeated waking vision of a monstrous flood covering Europe from the North Sea to the Alps, yellow waves carrying wreckage and the drowned. He recorded that he feared for his own sanity, and that when war broke out the following summer he concluded the vision had concerned not himself but the world. The episode, told in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, became the founding case for his tradition's claim that flood imagery can speak for something larger than the dreamer, an overwhelm gathering beneath collective life.

Behind his vision stood the oldest stories the species keeps. The deluge of Genesis, the flood of Utnapishtim in Gilgamesh, Deucalion's flood in Greek tradition, Manu warned by the fish in the Indian: the waters that rise over everything and the one household preserved recur across unconnected literatures, which is precisely why depth psychology took the image as archetypal rather than local.

The working readings are humbler. Interpreters across schools read the dream flood as emotion or circumstance past containment, the banks of ordinary coping overrun, with the dreamer's position, fleeing, floating, climbing or building, read as their current relation to the overwhelm. The folk dictionaries read floods toward troubles arriving in numbers. As ever, these are the traditions' readings; Jung's flood is cited as the tradition's own most famous exhibit, not as proof.