Ocean

In the interpretation of dreams, Ocean is among the recurring images that traditional dream-books and modern depth psychology have alike tried to read. It is commonly interpreted as the vast unconscious, the collective depths, or emotions too large to contain.

Common readings

In depth-psychology readings large bodies of water often stand for the unconscious, and the state of the sea, calm or storm-tossed, is read as the state of the dreamer's feeling 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 of every school agree that the state of the dream sea matters more than the sea itself. A calm ocean crossed safely, a storm survived, a shore never reached and a deep that pulls the dreamer under are treated as four different dreams, and the dreamer's own relation to water in waking life, sailor, swimmer or someone who fears it, shifts the sense again. The scale of the image is usually taken seriously: an ocean is not a pond, and readings that fit a contained feeling are not stretched to cover a limitless one.

The oldest surviving dream manuals were written for a seafaring world, and they read the ocean accordingly. Artemidorus of Daldis, whose Oneirocritica was compiled in the second century, treats the sea largely through what people did on it: voyages, cargoes, harbours and storms, read one way for a merchant whose living crossed the water and another for a farmer who never would. His method, interpreting the same image differently by the dreamer's station and circumstances, is visible nowhere better than here.

The modern depth reading descends from a different source. C. G. Jung wrote repeatedly that water is the commonest symbol of the unconscious in dreams, and the sea, in the Jungian tradition, became the unconscious at its most collective and impersonal: the element every individual river runs into. Freud's tradition attends instead to the feelings the water carries, and to the sea's old associations with the maternal, readings his school derived from its theory rather than from any dream book.

Between the two stand the folk dream dictionaries, which read calm seas toward good fortune and rough ones toward trouble with cheerful confidence. All three registers survive in circulation, and they do not agree; the atlas records them as the traditions' readings, not as settled fact.