DREAM GALAXY

Research case · Water

A cup that was never empty

Great Basin, western US · traditional (recorded 1870s)

Now the boy had been told in the dream of his three days’ slumber of a magical cup, and he had brought it home with him from his journey among the nations

Original text — First Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, 1879–80, J. W. Powell (dir.), H. C. Yarrow et al.

Open this dream in the galaxy →

Source
First Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, 1879–80 — J. W. Powell (dir.), H. C. Yarrow et al., 1881. Powell, Sketch of the Mythology of the North American Indians
Rights
Public domain (US)
Record type
Research case
Place
Great Basin, western US · Native American, Numic (Ute–Paiute)
Date
traditional (recorded 1870s)
Uncertainty
High — From the First Annual Report of the US Bureau of Ethnology (1881); recorded by government ethnographers, with their own framing. A Numic (Ute–Southern Paiute) myth retold by J. W. Powell.
Imagery
Water · Food · Child
Feelings
Wonder · Relief

Another way to look at this dream

Notes on the images in this dream from psychology, myth, folklore and semiotics. Each names its source.

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

All perspectives on water →

Child

Whose child was it — yours, someone you know, or yourself when young? What did the child need?

Jung · The child archetype

Jung described the “child” in dreams and myth as an image of what is not yet — a beginning, small and easy to overlook, that carries a future.

C. G. Jung, “The Psychology of the Child Archetype”, Collected Works 9i

Psychoanalysis Depth psychology

Freud began his theory with children’s dreams, which he found to be plain, undisguised wishes — a trip promised, a treat withheld.

Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), ch. III

East Asian custom Folk saying

In China and Korea (where it is called taemong), “conception dreams” before a birth are a living custom, often retold within families.

East Asian folk custom

All perspectives on child →

Exploration notes, not a diagnosis, a prediction, or evidence of real events.

Dreams that share its images