What Does Dreaming Of Entering the Sea Mean?

Entering rough, murky water is read by the interpreters as a hard process that pays in the end; Al-Nabulsi ties struggling with the waves to toilsome earnings. Nearly drowning yet reaching the shore points to returning safely from a straining work. The sources look at the water's state: the hardship is in the waves, the gain is in the courage of entering, and the reading calls to patience rather than fear.

Ibn Sirin counts one who enters the sea as a person stepping into a great work or a stately door; he reads the water's clearness as the lawfulness of the work and its murkiness as entanglement. Coming out without getting wet he reads as slipping unharmed out of a hard matter. Al-Nabulsi ties the entering to setting out for provision, and calm water to a portion that comes easily to hand.

The interpreters read entering as the beginning and swimming as the continuing: to enter the sea is to step into a great matter, to swim with ease is to master it. Diving toward the deep is counted as going to the root of the matter and a hidden gain. Entering step by step tells of caution that keeps the work sound, leaping from the shore of a great decision taken at once; each is read toward good in its own measure.

The sea is the oldest symbol of the unconscious; entering it shows the moment a person consents to touch their own depths. In the Jungian approach this is leaving the shore's safety and opening into one's own deep waters; the shiver on entering is the natural threshold of the unknown. Freud reads water as the carrier of feeling; swimming at ease is living at peace with what it holds.