Concerning bodies of water in dreams (oceans, lakes etc), take a lead from Heraclitus: “To souls, it is death to become water…” (or Freeman, frg 77: “It is delight, or rather death, to souls to become wet…”).
Jung, Rosarium Philosophorum (CW 16) also offers a host of psychological insights on the many implications of water.
We can connect Heraclitus’ statement above with the alchemical motto: “Perform no operation until all has become water.”
Ie the opus begins in dying.
Hillman: “When a dream image is moistened, it is entering the dissolutio and is becoming, in Bachelard’s sense, more psychisized, made into soul, for water is the special element of reverie, the element of reflective images and their ceaseless, ungraspable flow. Moistening in dreams refers ton the soul’s delight in its death, its delight in sinking away from fixations in literalized concerns.
“Entering the waters relaxes one’s hold on things and lets go of where one has been stuck. The “waters” that one goes into may be like a new environment or a new body of doctrine that wraps one round and which may both hold one up or suck one into its deeps. It may be like a new sexual relationship… a river that carries one rushing along… on on which one floats feeling a deep and moving support. … as Bachelard says, the language of water is rich for metaphorical reverie.
“…an impersonal elemental quality” of water; “If one looks carefully at the dream, the emotion is usually located in the dry ego-soul as it dissolves, not in the waters, which often are simply there, cool, dispassionate, receiving.”
“So the image-soul’s delight is the ego-soul’s dread…. it fears drowning in torrents, whirlpools, tidal waves….
Heraclitus, however, like alchemical psychology, sees death in water as the way of dissolving one kind of earth while another kind comes into being. Fragment 36 (Freeman) continues:
To souls, it is death to become water;
to water, it is death to become earth.
From earth comes water, and from water, soul.
“Literal fixations in earthbound problems do stop the soul’s movement, and so “it is death to become earth.” The soul does want to flow on and move through. Now, since death also means the perspective of soul, these very same fixations put soul into earth and earth into soul, giving to matters a new psychic sense. A psychic matter forms ie “from earth comes water.” We begin to see and feel psychologically what matters in the soul’s fixations. This regenerates water, as well as soul.
“Literalizations that kill the flow and bury the soul always need dissolving; at the same time what is dissolved always finds new earthworks to stop flow. This is an ever-recurring process, as in alchemy, describing a cycle of soul making, for which dissolution in water is necessary. To fear the dream’s waters is to fear being surrounded and sunk into the body of this cycle in which the soul delights.”
Notes and quotations from Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld pp. 151-153
Linnets Sing In The Trees 
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