What Does Dreaming About a Wave Mean?

Psychologically, the wave is a surge of water rolling in and cresting — and so it most often touches a surge of emotion or force coming at you: a swell of feeling, an overwhelming situation, or a powerful change rolling in. Water is feeling, and a wave is feeling (or force) gathered into a swell that rises, crests, and breaks — so the wave's meaning gathers around the surge, the threat of being overwhelmed, the ebb and flow, and how you meet what's rolling in.

This carries several charges. As a surge of emotion, the wave touches a 'wave' of feeling — grief, fear, love, anger, or change cresting over you, a swell of emotion rising. As being overwhelmed or swept away, a big or crashing wave touches the threat of being overwhelmed, swept away, or knocked down by something too big — emotion or circumstance that engulfs. As an oncoming challenge or change, a wave rolling in touches something powerful coming at you — a challenge, a change, or a force you see approaching. As ebb and flow, waves touch the natural rise and fall, the tides and rhythms of life — what comes in and goes out. As riding the wave, surfing or riding a wave touches meeting the surge with skill — riding the force rather than being crushed by it. Whether the wave crests, crashes over you, sweeps you up, or you ride it usually mirrors a surge of emotion, being overwhelmed or swept away, an oncoming challenge or change, the ebb and flow of life, and riding the wave.

A Freudian reading would attend to the wave as the surging swell of water — bound up with the surge of feeling that rises and crests, with the threat of being engulfed and swept by the powerful swell, and with the rhythmic rise and fall of the tides. The wave can embody the surge of feeling that rises and breaks, the threat of being engulfed by the swell, and the rhythmic rise and fall of the tides.

Its cresting or its crashing carries the charge of the surge and of being engulfed. What the wave evokes — the swell of the cresting wave, the engulfing of the crashing one, the rhythm of the tides — tends to point at the dreamer's relationship to surging feeling: the swell of emotion that rises and crests, the threat of being engulfed and swept by what is too big, and the rhythmic ebb and flow of feeling's tides.

Scripture's waves are an image of trouble and of the storms of life — the 'waves and billows' that 'are gone over me,' the doubter 'like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed,' yet also the waves stilled at a word ('Peace, be still'). The wave touches these themes of overwhelming trouble, instability, and the storm that is stilled by God.

A wave dream, read this way, can touch overwhelming feeling, instability, a surge of trouble, or a storm to be stilled. A biblical sensibility might weigh the wave through 'all thy waves and thy billows are gone over me' (the cry of one overwhelmed) and the stilling of the waves at 'Peace, be still' — reading the dream as a prompt that even when the waves go over us, we may cry out and be heard, and a hope that the storm is not beyond the One who stills the waves; an invitation to meet overwhelming surges with a faith that can say 'Peace, be still,' steadied against being 'tossed' like a wave.

In Islamic sensibility the wave touches the power of the sea as a sign of God, the overwhelming surge (the Qur'anic image of one in the depths covered by 'waves, over which are waves, over which are clouds' — layered darkness and overwhelm), and the deliverance God brings from the engulfing sea. The wave evokes the sea's power as a sign, overwhelming surge, and deliverance.

A wave dream, in this frame, might point to a surge of emotion, being overwhelmed, an oncoming force, or deliverance. Held with humility, the wave can recall the Qur'anic image of overwhelm — 'waves, over which are waves' of darkness — and the truth that deliverance from the engulfing sea is from God alone, who calms and saves; reading the dream as an invitation, when waves of feeling or trouble surge and threaten to overwhelm, to turn to God for deliverance and steadiness, trusting the One whose signs the seas are and who saves from the depths.

In a Hindu frame the wave touches the rise and fall of feeling and circumstance, and a profound image — the wave as a form the ocean takes (a wave is not separate from the ocean, as the individual self is not separate from the infinite), rising and subsiding while the ocean remains. The wave evokes the surge and subsiding of feeling, and the wave-and-ocean image of self and the infinite.

A wave dream, in this frame, can point to a surge of emotion, being overwhelmed, an oncoming change, or the ebb and flow. The tradition's note attends to the surge and the wave-and-ocean: the wave as the rise and fall of feeling and circumstance, and as the image of the wave that rises from and subsides back into the ocean (the self not separate from the infinite) — an invitation to meet the surges and subsidings of feeling with equanimity, knowing they rise and pass, and to remember the deeper 'ocean' that remains constant beneath the rising and falling waves.