Dream Galaxy

Research case · Water

Coming up the Thames

London, England · before 1911

Again I dreamed that I was coming up the Thames (apparently in a steamboat), reading a novel, written by a friend, which was the history of some one who arrives in England coming up the Thames to London, by what I felt to be an extraordinary coincidence, in exactly the same way as I was at the moment. Then I found myself seemingly at the end of a London pier, with the river rippling at my feet, and in front the superb panorama of London…

Original text — The World of Dreams, Havelock Ellis

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Source
The World of Dreams — Havelock Ellis, 1911. Ch. II
Rights
Public domain (US)
Record type
Research case
Place
London, England · British
Date
before 1911
Uncertainty
Moderate
Imagery
River · Boat · Book · City
Feelings
Wonder · Confusion

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