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Dreaming of a river : what can this symbol evoke?
A river is not water : it is a direction. It always goes to the same place, it never runs back, and the water one sees in it will be gone in a moment. Dreaming of a river has no single meaning : it depends on your position relative to the current.
A form that lasts and a content that passes
A river is named as a person is, though it changes its water entirely several times a day. What bears the name is not the matter but the course : a stable form filled with a content ceaselessly renewed.
Dreams often use this structure for what stays identical in you while everything in it has changed. A character, a way of loving, a way of reacting : circumstances have all been replaced, and the form has stayed recognisable.
The question it poses is useful : what in you has not changed course? Those who dream of rivers often observe a continuity they did not know they carried.
One does not go back up it
A river has one direction, and it takes it from the slope. One can cross it, go down it, be carried by it — one goes back up only by struggling, and never very far.
Dreams use that irreversibility for what, in a life, does not return. A decision made, an age reached, a word said : the rivers of the ancient underworld said exactly that, they were crossed in one direction.
The decisive detail is what you were doing. Crossing speaks of passage from one state to another ; going downstream, of a consent ; going back up, of an effort against the way of things — and the dream generally shows how long you held.
Your position changes the reading
- Watching from the bank — observing a movement you do not take part in.
- Crossing it — a passage from one state to another, not easily reversed.
- Letting oneself be carried — a consent, which is not the same as an abandonment.
- Going back up against it — an effort against the way of things, whose duration the dream measures.
- A dry river — a direction remaining with nothing to travel it.
- A flood leaving the bed — what overflows the usual course and carries off what was around.
A psychological reading, not a ready-made box
Depth psychology distinguishes still waters from running ones : the first point to what rests at the bottom, the second to what advances and does not return. The river figures a life's duration there, with a persisting form and an entirely renewed content. Other readings retain the infernal rivers and the passage without return they mark.
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