Literary dream · Water
Morpheus wears the drowned husband’s face
Trachis, Thessaly (myth) · c. 8 CE (poem)
he assumes the form of Ceyx; and in that form, wan, and like one without blood, without garments, he stands before the bed of his wretched wife. The beard of the hero appears to be dripping, and the water to be falling thickly from his soaking hair. Then leaning on the bed, with tears running down his face, he says these words: “My most wretched wife, dost thou recognise thy Ceyx, or are my looks so changed with death?
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- Source
- The Metamorphoses of Ovid, Books VIII–XV (Riley trans.) — Ovid; trans. Henry T. Riley, c. 8 / 1851 (trans.). Metamorphoses, Book XI
- Record type
- Literary dream
- Place
- Trachis, Thessaly (myth) · Roman
- Date
- c. 8 CE (poem)
- Uncertainty
- High — From Ovid’s Metamorphoses (H. T. Riley prose trans., 1851); Morpheus, son of Sleep, imitates human shapes in dreams.
- Imagery
- Partner · Water · Sea · The dead
- Feelings
- Grief · Longing
Another way to look at this dream
Notes on the images in this dream from psychology, myth, folklore and semiotics. Each names its source.
Partner
Was it your partner now, someone from the past, or someone you have never met? Was the distance between you the same as when you are awake?
Jung · Anima and animus — after the real person
Jung would first read a dreamed partner as your actual partner and relationship. Only then might the figure carry what he called the anima or animus — an inner image of the other — a framing that reflects his era’s ideas about gender.
C. G. Jung, “The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious, “Anima and Animus””, Collected Works 7
Homeric epic Classical text
After twenty years apart, Penelope tells how a likeness of Odysseus lay beside her that night, “such as he was when he went with the host”, and how she took it for real.
Homer, Odyssey XX
Han-dynasty poetry Literature
In one of the Nineteen Old Poems, a wife sleeping alone through the long nights dreams she sees her husband’s face, and he comes for her in a carriage — then is gone.
Nineteen Old Poems, “Cold, cold, the year draws to its end”
Water
Was the water clear or muddy, still or rising? Which water in your own life — a place, a swim, a flood — does it bring back first?
Jung · The unconscious
Jung called water the most common image for the unconscious: something deep, below the surface, that we can look into but not see through.
C. G. Jung, “Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious”, Collected Works 9i
Classical Chinese medicine Historical medicine
The Lingshu pairs dream images with the balance of yin and yang: when yin is excessive, one “dreams of wading through great water, and is afraid”. This is a historical theory about the body, not medical advice and not a way to diagnose anything.
Huangdi Neijing, Lingshu ch. 43 “Yinxie Fameng”
Hebrew Bible; Babylonian myth Myth & scripture
Several creation stories begin with primordial water — “darkness was upon the face of the deep” in Genesis, the fresh-water Apsu in the Babylonian Enuma Elish. Here water is what exists before order.
Genesis 1:2; Enuma Elish I
The dead
Who was it, and did they seem to know they had died? Was there something you were able to say, or not able to?
Jung · Objective level first
Jung’s memoir records his own dreams of his late father and treats them with seriousness rather than symbol-hunting: a dream of someone who has died is first about that person and that bond.
C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962)
Early dream research Dream research
Ellis devoted a chapter to dreams of the dead, noting how often the dead appear as if alive and how such dreams can bring comfort.
Havelock Ellis, The World of Dreams (1911), ch. VIII
Homeric epic Classical text
Achilles dreams of the dead Patroclus, who asks to be buried; Achilles reaches out to embrace him and grasps nothing.
Homer, Iliad XXIII
Exploration notes, not a diagnosis, a prediction, or evidence of real events.
Dreams that share its images
- My friend fell into the river over a gambling debt Zhejiang River, China · 3rd–4th century
- What pain it was to drown London, England · c. 1593 (play)
- I jumped into the sea and regretted it Tokyo, Japan · 1908
- My father sinking into a lake of mire Ayodhya (setting) · c. 5th–4th c. BCE (epic)
- My wife wrote me a poem in the dream Chengcheng, Shaanxi, China · c. 880
- I have suffered many things this day in a dream Jerusalem · c. 30 (narrative)