Literary dream · Water
What pain it was to drown
London, England · c. 1593 (play)
O Lord, methought what pain it was to drown, What dreadful noise of waters in my ears; What sights of ugly death within my eyes. Methoughts I saw a thousand fearful wracks; A thousand men that fishes gnawed upon; Wedges of gold, great anchors, heaps of pearl
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- Source
- The Complete Works of William Shakespeare — William Shakespeare, c. 1593–1607. Richard III, I.iv
- Record type
- Literary dream
- Place
- London, England · British
- Date
- c. 1593 (play)
- Uncertainty
- Moderate — Fictional dream of the Duke of Clarence, shortly before his murder.
- Imagery
- Sea · Water · Boat · The dead · Crowd
- Feelings
- Horror · Unease
How traditions have read this kind of dream
Psychological
Early dream researchers often linked water imagery to bodily sensation and mood; later psychoanalytic writers read deep water as a figure for what lies below awareness. Modern researchers treat such readings as interpretive traditions rather than findings.
cf. Havelock Ellis, The World of Dreams (1911)
Mythological
Many cosmologies begin with primordial waters — the deep of Genesis, the Babylonian Apsu, the cosmic ocean of Hindu myth — so water often stands for origins, boundaries and crossings between worlds.
Comparative mythology
Chinese traditions
In Chinese poetry water carries time and loss — “all things flow east like water” (Li Bai) — while Daoist texts praise water as soft yet enduring.
Li Bai; Daodejing ch. 8
These are cultural lenses, not a diagnosis.
Dreams that share its images
- A statue running with blood Rome (setting) · 1599 (play); set 44 BCE
- The guillotine fell France · c. 1850
- My friend fell into the river over a gambling debt Zhejiang River, China · 3rd–4th century
- A masked man asked for his bone back Huangkeng, China · c. 795
- The sea paved with faces Grasmere, England · c. 1817–1819
- Cut in two down the middle United States · before 1911