Dreaming of a swimming pool: what can this symbol evoke?

Water whose edges have been drawn

Lake, sea or river: natural water has neither clear outline nor visible bottom. The swimming pool is its opposite, a geometric basin, filtered, supervised, divided into lanes. You know where it begins, where it ends, and how far you can touch the bottom.

For Jung, water is the commonest symbol of the unconscious; the lake at the bottom of the valley stands for what lies beneath consciousness. The pool offers a tamed version of it, a safe way of approaching one's inner life. Jung used the Greek word temenos, the sacred precinct, to name the protected space without which inner work cannot begin.

Yet a setting that is too perfect can also keep things at a distance. Chlorinated water, with neither current nor real depth, sometimes speaks of an emotional life controlled to the point that nothing happens in it any more.

The pool of Bethesda

In an essay on the archetypes, Jung comments on the dream of a theologian who saw a dark lake below him and felt prevented from approaching it. He links this scene to a story in the Gospel of John: in Jerusalem, the pool of Bethesda healed the first sick person to step in after an angel had stirred the water. The dreamer was right to be afraid, Jung judges, but it was precisely at the edge of that water that the living spirit could act.

The Gospel story contains a detail that pool dreams often rediscover: a paralysed man has waited thirty-eight years at the edge of the pool without ever getting in, for want of someone to carry him. One can dream of a pool while staying on the edge; that may be the whole subject of the dream.

Shallow end, deep end

Many people learned to swim clutching the side before daring to let go. Moving from the shallow end, where you can stand, to the deep end, where the floor falls away, is one of childhood's first tests of trust; the same test reappears in dreams when life once again asks you to let go.

The pool is also a place of exposure: the body almost bare, under a harsh light, among others. Some pool dreams speak less of the water than of the gaze one endures there.

At the edge or in the water

• Clear water through which you can see the bottom — a period of inner clarity, when you understand yourself better.
• An empty pool — an emotional resource run dry, or a ready setting waiting to be filled.
• Murky water in a pool meant to be clean — a safe place that no longer quite is.
• Sitting on the edge without swimming — the wait at Bethesda: knowing the water is there, and not getting in.
• Diving into the deep end — finally committing where you are out of your depth.
• Swimming length after length — a discipline that gives structure, or a routine going round in circles.
• A pool that extends all the way to the sea — the setting giving way, controlled water joining open water.

A psychological reading, not a ready-made box

The Jungian reading sees the unconscious in water, and in the swimming pool a part of it made approachable. Jung himself dreamed, in 1927, of a round pool at the centre of a dark, rainy city, with in its middle a sunlit island bearing a magnolia; he recognised in it an image of the centre of the personality, which he called the Self. Other approaches link these dreams to concrete memories — holidays, swimming lessons, changing rooms — whose emotion resurfaces intact.