Dreaming about swimming — meaning and interpretation

The classical reading here is more interesting than the modern emotional one. The corpus reads swimming as entry into a great affair rather than as a relation to feeling: since the sea habitually figures a ruler or a power far larger than the dreamer, one strand reads swimming in it as having entered into dealings with such a power, and getting out onto land as coming through them intact. Reaching the far shore reads toward a purpose accomplished; swimming with no land in sight, or in dark and troubled water, toward a matter one is out of one's depth in.

Clear water is favourable throughout, which is a corpus-wide habit rather than anything specific to swimming and can be said as such. The contrast with drowning is the tradition's own and it is sharp — competence in the element against being taken by it — and the drowning article carries that side of it. What makes the classical frame worth having is that it asks a question the emotional reading does not: not how the dreamer feels about the water, but what they have got themselves into.

The contrast set does most of the work here: drowning is being taken by the element, flying is the dreamer's own power in a medium that offers no resistance, and swimming is that same power in the one medium that does. What sets swimming apart is that it has to be maintained. Swimming is not a state attained but an activity continued, and in a Jungian reading that makes it an image of a relation to unconscious material which is never achieved once and held — competence here is ongoing work.

Losing the bottom is the moment the dream usually turns on: up to that point the skill is technique, and past it it is trust, which is a different faculty and is not acquired by practice. And the very common form in which the dreamer swims far better than they can in waking life reads toward a capacity the psyche has registered before the ego has — the dream as anticipation rather than as wish, which is one of the few places where the school reads a pleasant dream as informative rather than compensatory.

The folk dream books give readings of the shape, hedged and paraphrased, that crossing a water and arriving at the other side portends a matter brought off; that swimming in clear water is favourable and in muddy or dark water reads toward trouble ahead; and that sinking, or being unable to get out, is unfavourable. Being taken under belongs to the drowning article and is not re-run here.

The language: 「如鱼得水」 (rú yú dé shuǐ, like a fish that has found water) is the phrase for being wholly in one's element, and the natural thing to reach for in describing the effortless swim — the fish's own material stays at the fish article. For the swim against the current the language's standing image is a boat rather than a swimmer, which is worth admitting while using it: 「逆水行舟，不进则退」 (nì shuǐ xíng zhōu, bù jìn zé tuì, poling a boat against the current — not to advance is to fall back), which belongs with the boat article. 「浑水摸鱼」 (hún shuǐ mō yú, groping for fish in muddy water) is the natural companion to the manual's muddy-water shape and adds a question the shape does not ask, since it is about someone profiting from the murk: is the dreamer lost in the dark water, or working it. 「水能载舟，亦能覆舟」 (shuǐ néng zài zhōu, yì néng fù zhōu, water can carry a boat and can equally overturn it) states the element's doubleness in one line. And the sharpest thing here is the counter-pole: 「淹死的都是会水的」 (yān sǐ de dōu shì huì shuǐ de, the ones who drown are the ones who could swim) — competence itself as the exposure, the confident swimmer being the one who goes out too far, which is where this page's subject turns from skill to risk.