Religious narrative · Water
Meeting a god by the great marsh
Pei (Xuzhou), China · c. 257 BCE (as told)
劉媼嘗息大澤之陂，夢與神遇。是時雷電晦冥，太公往視，則見蛟龍於其上。
Old Mrs Liu once rested on the bank of a great marsh and dreamed she met a god. Thunder and lightning darkened the sky; when her husband went to look, he saw a dragon above her.
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- Source
- Records of the Grand Historian, Annals of Gaozu — Sima Qian, c. 94 BCE
- Record type
- Religious narrative
- Place
- Pei (Xuzhou), China · Chinese
- Date
- c. 257 BCE (as told)
- Uncertainty
- High — Birth legend of Liu Bang, founder of Han, in Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian.
- Imagery
- Lake · Water · Storm · Animals · Mother
- Feelings
- Awe
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
- Four great beasts from the sea Babylon · narrative set c. 6th c. BCE
- Floating on warm, transparent lakes Paris, France · c. 1900
- Ten men in black begging for their lives Jinyang, China · 4th century (Jin)
- I dreamed I was the fish Shanyin (Shaoxing), China · 837
- The eagle and the twenty geese Ithaca, ancient Greece · c. 8th century BCE
- The animals fell out of Noah’s ark Zurich, Switzerland · c. 1910