What Does Dreaming About a Well Mean?

Psychologically, the well is a shaft into the depths — drawing water (and water is emotion and the unconscious) up from deep below the surface. So a well most often touches your deep inner resources, the unconscious, and what you draw up from within: hidden emotions, deep wisdom, intuition, or sustenance drawn from the depths of yourself. The well is the image of reaching into your own depths to draw up what lies there.

This carries several charges. As inner resources and sustenance, the well touches drawing on your deep reserves — the wisdom, strength, emotion, or sustenance you can draw up from within. As the unconscious and depths, the deep, dark shaft touches the unconscious, the depths of yourself, what lies far below the surface, and the unknown within. As deep emotions, drawing water from a well touches deep feelings rising from the depths to the surface. As wishes, the 'wishing well' touches hopes, wishes, and desires (cast into the depths). A dry well touches depletion, emptiness, or feeling your inner resources have run dry. A deep or bottomless well can touch the unknown, profound depths, or a fear of falling into them. Whether you draw water up, make a wish, peer into the depths, or find the well dry usually mirrors your deep inner resources and what you draw from within, the unconscious and the depths, deep emotions rising, wishes and hopes, and depletion when the well runs dry.

A Freudian reading would attend to the well as the shaft into the depths — drawing up the waters of feeling and the unconscious from far below, evoking the hidden depths, the unconscious reserves, and what is drawn up from the dark below the surface. The well can embody the unconscious depths and the drawing-up of what lies hidden far below, the deep reserves of feeling brought to the surface.

Its depth and its drawing-up carry the charge of the hidden depths and of what is brought up from them. What the well evokes — the mystery of its depths, the drawing-up of deep water, the dread of the dry or bottomless shaft — tends to point at the dreamer's relationship to the unconscious depths: the hidden reserves and feelings far below the surface, the drawing-up of what lies in the deep, and the mystery and the resources held in the depths of the self.

Scripture's wells are places of provision, encounter, and living water — Jacob's well where Jesus offered 'living water... a well of water springing up into everlasting life,' the wells of provision in the wilderness, and the deep well of refreshment in dry places. The well touches this theme of provision, deep refreshment, and the 'living water' drawn from the depths.

A well dream, read this way, can touch deep resources, refreshment, the drawing-up of sustenance, or 'living water.' A biblical sensibility might weigh the well as a place of deep provision and refreshment — and read it alongside the 'living water' Jesus offered at the well, 'springing up into everlasting life' — reading the dream as a prompt to draw on deep, refreshing sustenance, and as a reminder of the deeper 'living water' that satisfies the soul's thirst from a well that never runs dry.

In Islamic tradition the well is a resonant image of provision and life — the well of Zamzam (the miraculous, blessed water that sprang for Hagar and Ishmael, a source of blessing and sustenance), and water drawn from the depths as a sign of God's provision and mercy in dry places. The well evokes blessed provision, life-giving water from the depths, and mercy.

A well dream, in this frame, might point to deep provision and resources, sustenance drawn from within or beyond, refreshment, or depletion (a dry well). Held with humility, the well can recall the blessed provision of water from the depths (as Zamzam sprang in the barren place), inviting gratitude for sustenance and trust in God's provision even in dry times — drawing on deep reserves and blessing, and trusting the One who brings forth life-giving water in the most barren places.

In a Hindu frame the well, drawing water from the depths, touches the deep inner source and reserves — the drawing-up of sustenance and life from the depths, and, more inwardly, the deep well of the inner self and its reserves of wisdom and life-energy (the depths from which one draws). The well evokes the deep inner source, sustenance from the depths, and inner reserves.

A well dream, in this frame, can point to deep inner resources, what one draws from within, the depths and the unconscious, or depletion. The tradition's note attends to the deep source within: the well as an image of the deep inner reserves of wisdom, sustenance, and life-energy from which one draws — an invitation to draw on one's deep inner source (rather than only surface reserves), to attend to the depths within, and to recognize the wellspring of sustenance and wisdom in one's own depths.