Anecdote collection · Water
Fell in the river, boots still dry
Chang’an, China · c. 810
其人忽夢乘驢渡水，蹶墜水中，登岸而靴不沾濕。
The man suddenly dreamed he was riding a donkey across the water when it stumbled and he fell in — yet when he climbed out, his boots were not even wet.
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- Source
- Taiping Guangji, dream volumes 276–282 — Li Fang et al. (compilers), 978
- Record type
- Anecdote collection
- Place
- Chang’an, China · Chinese
- Date
- c. 810
- Uncertainty
- High — Anecdote preserved in the Taiping Guangji (978); the dream is reported, not first-hand.
- Imagery
- River · Water · Animals · Falling
- Feelings
- Confusion · Relief
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
- The animals fell out of Noah’s ark Zurich, Switzerland · c. 1910
- A crab hidden in the ford Zurich, Switzerland · c. 1916
- Testing whether the water was hot England · before 1911
- My friend fell into the river over a gambling debt Zhejiang River, China · 3rd–4th century
- Seven lean cows Egypt (narrative setting) · undated (text c. 6th c. BCE)
- A long green dog from the south Liangzhou (Wuwei), China · 376 (as told)