Dreaming of waves : what can this symbol evoke?

Agitation without direction

A cork on the sea rises and falls : after an hour it is almost in the same place. That is the swell's most counter-intuitive fact — it gives the impression of considerable displacement and produces none.

Dreams often use this figure for very agitated periods without progression. An anxiety rising and falling, a relationship made of outbursts and reconciliations, intense work from which nothing comes. It is not immobility, and it is not movement.

The question it poses is useful to those who exhaust themselves : in six months, where have you arrived? Those who dream of waves often confuse intensity with advance.

A rhythm one does not command

Waves have a regularity depending on nothing local : the swell comes from far, from a wind that blew elsewhere, sometimes days before. What arrives on the beach was formed hundreds of kilometres away.

Dreams often use this dimension for what reaches you without having its cause near you. A mood returning for no identifiable reason, a family's general state, a collective anxiety breathed without being named. Looking for the cause on the spot yields nothing.

What to remember is the regularity. A regular swell says a deep phenomenon ; a short, disordered sea says a local wind, therefore a near and identifiable cause — and that distinction entirely changes where to look.

What the waves do changes the reading

• Rising and falling without advancing — intense agitation you may take for progression.
• A regular swell from far off — a cause not near you, useless to seek on the spot.
• A short, choppy sea — a local wind, therefore a near and identifiable cause.
• Being lifted without being carried — the commonest sensation, and the most tiring.
• The backwash taking back what it deposited — what is given and withdrawn at the same rhythm.
• A sea calming at once — the end of a phenomenon whose cause had ceased long before.

A psychological reading, not a ready-made box

Depth psychology distinguishes movements that transport from those that agitate : the latter cost as much energy and produce no change, which makes them particularly exhausting. It notes that dreams of rough seas often accompany periods the dreamer judges active. Other readings retain the swell's distant origin and recall that a cause is not necessarily where the effect shows.