Aeyde Traum Ch. 03

'Premonitions' by Jamieson Webster

A personal essay on the possibility of dreams as premonition

Can dreams tell the future? Freud answers this question twice, and not in the same way. Officially, no: dreams are not prophecies but desires that haven’t found expression except in the form of dreams. “A number of these dreams are understood… not as premonitions about a still unrevealed future, but as the fulfilment of wishes.” And yet, in a quieter register, Freud admits that dreams have always been treated as messages telling us what is to come—and that something in them continues to invite this reading. What is strange is not that dreams seem prophetic, but that we experience our lives this way at all. The patient who says, I knew this would happen, is not claiming knowledge but registering an unconscious logic. Something repeats, insists, arranges itself with an eerie familiarity in our lives. A little like fate. Freud’s model suggests that what feels like the future is already lodged somewhere waiting, pressing us forward. Driving us.

One of the most interesting images linking the past and future are dreams of water: both our origin as aquatic species, our existence in intra-uterine life, and a sense of protection by a mother. But also, perhaps an intimation of the future as a threatened relation to mother-earth. I was recently surprised to find in Freud’s case of a young hysteric he named Dora—a case I’ve read dozens of times—a reference to a repetitive dream I had not remembered. He wanted to demonstrate that no dream is identical, even, or especially, when patients feel they are. The devil is in the details.

“A patient told me that she had her favorite dream the night before and that it always recurred in the same form: She had dreamed of swimming in the blue sea, of joyfully cleaving her way through the waves, and so on. On closer investigation it turned out that upon a common background now one detail and now another was brought out; on one occasion, even, she was swimming in a frozen sea and was surrounded by icebergs. This patient had other dreams, which turned out to be closely connected with the recurrent one, though even she made no attempt to claim that they were identical with it.”

As I read this, it was as if I had never read it before. Like the passage was previously redacted. How could that be possible? Even stranger, I’ve always repetitively dreamt of swimming—my favorite dreams. Freud mentions these pleasurable dreams in a chapter where Dora is explaining her most urgent and unpleasant feelings, namely a sense of danger and lostness in her life, claustrophobia in her family, and a sense of being dismissed by the adults around her. These joyful dreams navigating the sea, cutting through the waves, seemed to promise a way out, another way of being. My analyst once remarked that water appeared to promise unmitigated enjoyment.

Dora and my dreams of the ocean are not a static memory. Something is being worked on. The dreams shift as if moving toward something it cannot yet reach. Swimming is not incidental here. It is the form the dream takes. To swim is to remain in relation to a medium we no longer belong to. One moves through water but cannot live there. One imitates, awkwardly, a prior condition, and yet what is prior promises us something enigmatic in the future. Dreams of water for Freud have always signaled birth, and yet, as the psychoanalyst Otto Rank posited, while it may be a memory of uterine life and birth, it is also a calling for rebirth. All of us must be born at least twice, biologically and socially. We must find a place in the world—in family, culture, community. We must, as the young ones like to call it, find our people.

Hungarian psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi radicalizes this intuition. In his book Thalassa, he asks us to imagine not an individual past, but a phylogenetic one:

“Imagine the surface of the earth surrounded entirely by water… The plants and animals… must either perish or adapt… before all, they must accustom themselves to obtain the gases necessary for the maintenance of life… from air instead of water.”

The lung replaces the gill. Breath replaces immersion. Life on land is not simply progress—it is forced invention under catastrophic conditions. Ferenczi’s wager is that this catastrophe leaves a trace. Not as a memory we can recall, but as a pressure in the psyche. The wish to return to the sea is not nostalgia; it is structural. The womb becomes its most intimate version—the sea carried within the body. But it is also a harbinger of catastrophe, when the seas dried up and forced our evolution. What is most uncanny, is that our lack of care for Mother Earth may mean we meet our past as a tragic fate. We might have to return to the sea.

Here we witness an oscillation in dream life along a much deeper axis. In my last book, On Breathing, I wrote that breathing is something we are meant to forget, that its rhythm recedes so that we can live. But it returns at the moment of disturbance—when it falters, when it speeds up, when it becomes visible. Its appearance forces us to confront what it means to depend on something outside ourselves to exist. The sea is often the fantasy of a world without this problem. But evolution does not abandon it so easily. Mammals return to the sea—whales, dolphins—not as fish but as transformed creatures. They carry lungs back into water and turn breathing into something entirely new: sonar, three-dimensional listening, song. They live between two incompatible environments, solving the problem only provisionally. The past persists inside all adaptations and as Ferenczi noted, in Nature, earlier forms often persist inside new adaptations. It’s never all new, as we are sometimes wont to believe.

This is perhaps the best image for the dream. Not a return, not a prediction, but a hybrid formation—something that carries forward an earlier condition while negotiating a new one. Joyous swimming in water organizes a movement without completing it. This is why dreams feel like premonitions. They do not reveal events; they reveal trajectories. In analysis, one sees this constantly. A dream appears that seems, in retrospect, to have anticipated something—a loss, a rupture, an encounter. A patient dreams of a betrayal before it occurs, or of a success that feels impossible. Later, something happens—not identical, but close enough to produce the feeling that it had already happened. But what the dream has anticipated is not the event itself, but the position from which it will be lived. The dream formats the experience in advance.

The future arrives with a shape. Should we want these intimations? Should we allow ourselves to trace their curves with our hands? Premonition often seems to promise mastery—an escape from uncertainty. But it also threatens to collapse the present. If everything were already known, what would remain of experience? What would remain of desire? Psychoanalysis resists this flattening; at least I hope it does. Refusing to offer knowledge of what will come, we can open the space where something else might occur. Psychoanalysis loosens the grip of repetition by making it visible and plastic.

And yet, Thalassa feels like a very present reality to me. Today, the fantasy of the sea returns in strange and catastrophic forms. As rising seas threaten coastlines and ecosystems, the image of immersion is no longer purely nostalgic. The ocean is no longer simply the site of origin or longing; it is also a force of destruction. What was once imagined as a protective environment reappears as a catastrophic one. Ferenczi’s prehistoric catastrophe—the retreat of the sea, the forced invention of lungs—appears to reverse itself. The future begins to look not like invention, but inundation. This has a prehistory with Carl Gustav Jung. In 1913, and then again several times in 1914, he dreamt of images of what seems like World War I: “I saw the mighty yellow waves, the floating rubble of civilization, and the drowned bodies of uncounted thousands. Then the whole sea turned to blood.” In 1961, on his deathbed, Jung dreamt of a ravaged earth: “I see enormous stretches devastated, enormous stretches of the earth. But thank God, not the whole planet.” Could he have been thinking of climate change?

At the same time, we build new seas. Digital space offers immersion without water, fluidity without resistance of substance. One can slip between identities, move without friction, exist in a kind of suspended continuity. It has the quality of a dream—anonymous, boundaryless, endlessly mutable. It offers a return—without catastrophe, without consequence. But this is precisely what makes it suspect. Because what is eliminated along with friction is relation. The resistance of the world—the fact that others are not simply extensions of oneself—is what gives desire its structure and adaptation its push. Without it, one risks a different kind of suffocation. Not the loss of breath, but the loss of address. A quiet asociality—a breaking of relations that happens invisibly. Barely an utterance of distress. We don’t drown; we drift. We lose attention.

Perhaps the dream is the last place to hold this contradiction open. Dreams move between sea and land, between womb and air, without allowing us to settle in either. To return fully to the sea would be to give up the conditions of our existence: speech, relation, time. I think the dream knows this. That is why Dora’s sea freezes. Why the wonderous waves are also cut by ice. Why immersion is never complete, and on the horizon, boats appear, towns dot the coastline, reminding her of all the others that she still needs to find a relation to. In our dreaming, we are alone. Now more than ever, we must wake up to one another again in the morning. Into the air, this evolutionary invention we never quite adapted to.

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