When you dream about water, you are reflecting on your feelings and emotions, and how they flow through you. Like your feelings, water often appears to be fluid and unpredictable and a tidal wave represents an apparently overwhelming surge of emotion that is sweeping through your waking life. Earthquakes often trigger tidal waves and this huge emotional surge may have been triggered by a seismic shift in one of your major relationships.

This significant change is flooding through all parts of your life and is threatening to engulf you. Your initial reaction is often to make an effort to raise yourself above all the emotional uproar. By claiming the moral higher ground, you hope to view the situation with some detachment.

You may, however, become engulfed in wave after wave of seemingly uncontrollable emotions. This can completely disorient you, making your heart sink and your head spin. Although you sometimes feel like the situation is really dragging you down, you manage to navigate your way through the chaos to a feeling of stability.

Even though you might be feeling all washed-up and crestfallen, you know this emotional turbulence, like all waves, will recede and fade into the distance. If the wave is hovering just offshore as you stand on the shore, this suggests that you are aware of a potential emotional disruption but you are taking a more objective view of your feelings, standing your ground until the turmoil passes.

This dream is reflecting your concerns about being engulfed by your emotions as you try and navigate your way through a period of major change. The situation is probably out of your control, so rather than trying to contain it, you may just have to accept it.

Rather than fully immersing yourself in the emotional chaos, try standing back and giving yourself a more objective view of your current circumstances. Although you may be trying to resist this change, you know deep down that it is inevitable.

Much of our language about our emotions is water based, such as a ‘surge of elation’, ‘ebbing enthusiasm’, or ‘an outpouring of grief’. Like our feelings, water seems to have its own rhythms and flows. Through experience, we also come to realize that, like water, our feelings can be incredibly powerful and can have deep and far-reaching effects on the rest of our lives.

The more aware that we become of our moods and rhythms, the more we realize that we can’t really contain our emotions, we can only ever hope to guide and influence them.