Swimming

The dream dictionary has its tidy verdict: you are going with the flow, navigating your emotions, staying afloat in difficult times. It hears the word water, reaches for feelings, and calls it a day. But swimming is not one image. There is the long, easy stroke through warm shallows and the panicked dog-paddle in cold black depth; the water that buoys you and the water that pulls you under; the surface you break gasping and the deep you sink into willingly. The tradition does not read swimming as a synonym for emotional management. It reads it as immersion — entering an element that is not your own — and the only useful questions are what kind of water this is, what it is doing to you, and whether you mean to come up.

James Hillman draws the line at exactly this point. Writing on the bodies of water that fill our dreams, he tells us to “bypass the symbolisms of lustration and baptism, of doctrinal wisdom and uterine mother, and also the too general meanings of life energy, Mercurius, and the unconscious” (Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld, 1979). The textbook readings are too dry. He takes his lead instead from Heraclitus — “To souls, it is death to become water” — and insists we attend to the kind of water: “the frigid Styx; the burning Pyriphlegethon; the mournful, wailing Cocytus; the depressive, black Acheron.” His most useful inversion is this: the dread we feel in the dream belongs to the part of us that is dissolving, not to the water itself. “The image-soul’s delight is the ego-soul’s dread.” We thrash because the daylight self fears drowning; the water, “cool, dispassionate, receiving,” is simply doing what water does.

The alchemists gave this drowning a name. Edward Edinger catalogs solutio, the operation that turns a solid to liquid, and is unambiguous about where it shows up at night: “Bath, shower, sprinkling, swimming, immersion in water, and so forth, are all symbolic equivalents for solutio that appear commonly in dreams” (Edinger, Anatomy of the Psyche, 1985). To swim, in this grammar, is to be dissolved — to let some fixed and certain part of yourself return to “its original undifferentiated state.” This is why the image cuts both ways. Edinger reads the recurring picture of the drowning king as the old ruling principle going under: “a swollen ego is dissolved by its own excess,” its dissolution clearing “the way to a possible rejuvenation on a sounder basis.” But the same water can dismember rather than hold. He cites Hylas, the favorite of Heracles, sent to fetch water and “pulled into a pool by water nymphs” — “a fatal solutio.” The difference is not in the water. It is in whether what enters it is ready to dissolve. “A blissful solutio is the most dangerous one,” Edinger warns, because the well-built ego experiences the loss of itself not as bliss but as annihilation.

Why should immersion carry this much weight? Mircea Eliade locates it in the oldest cosmology. “Immersion in water signifies regression to the preformal, reincorporation into the undifferentiated mode of pre-existence,” he writes; “this is why the symbolism of the waters implies both death and rebirth” (Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, 1957). To go under is to un-form, to be reabsorbed into what came before shape; to surface is to be created again. “Contact with water always brings a regeneration,” he adds — not because nothing dies, but because “dissolution is followed by a new birth.” The swimmer in the dream is performing, in miniature, the drama every baptism stages: a small death by water from which a different person climbs out.

The Greeks did not need a pool to feel this. For them the mind itself was a kind of weather of fluids. Ruth Padel shows how, in the tragic imagination, “emotion is often liquid” — the inner self darkens and “fill[s] with liquid in passion,” so that “passion itself” begins to resemble “a kind of loss of consciousness” (Padel, In and Out of the Mind, 1994). And the place the dead go is a country of water: “there are always rivers in it,” she notes, the Styx “downward-flowing,” souls coming “down for refreshment” to drink. To be deep in feeling, for the Greek, was already to be partly submerged, partly in the underworld; the dreaming swimmer simply makes the geography literal. The waters of emotion and the waters of death share a single dark.

So the panic of the swimming dream may be misread from the start. Otto Rank, sifting the birth-myths of heroes cast into the sea, points to a counterintuitive rule Freud had drawn from the dream of a woman who “hurls herself in the dark water of a lake.” “Dreams of this sort are birth-dreams,” Rank reports, “and their interpretation is accomplished by reversing the fact as communicated in the manifest dream; namely, instead of hurling oneself into the water, it means emerging from the water, i.e., to be born” (Rank, The Myth of the Birth of the Hero, 1909). The hero is exposed on the flood, the infant arrives through “the amniotic fluid,” and the same image that looks like sinking is, turned over, the act of being delivered.

This is why no single meaning will hold. Swimming is the body placed in its first element and asked whether it will dissolve. The dictionary wants to know if you are coping. The tradition wants to know what kind of water you are in, and which direction you are actually moving — down toward the undifferentiated, or up and out into a new form. Hillman’s line is the one to keep: the dread is the dry self’s, not the water’s. The dream is not warning you that you are in over your head. It is asking whether you are ready to let the old shape go and find out what is born on the other side of going under.