Dreaming About Flooding? Here's What It Means + 7 Specific Flood Dream Scenarios

Dreams about flooding are most often related to a real-life situation that's getting worse—the waters are rising, just as your stress in real life is rising. As professional dream interpreter Lauri Loewenberg tells mindbodygreen, "The nature of the flood is that it rises and it keeps rising—so in that vein, what in your real life seems to be doing the same thing?"

Water in dreams also tends to represent emotions, so when a flood is rising out of control, Loewenberg adds that this could indicate your emotions are getting increasingly more fragile or difficult to deal with. Depending on the context of the dream and the specifics involved, however, the meaning of the dream becomes a bit more nuanced.

Specifics always matter in dreams, like who you're with, where you are, and more. So if you're dreaming that your home is flooding, it likely has to do with something in your personal or family life.

As Loewenberg explains, if it's your living room that's flooding, for instance, it's reflecting a situation that you're living with on a daily basis. If it's your bedroom, on the other hand, that could be speaking more to intimacy or your current partnership. Moving to the bathroom, where we, ahem, relieve ourselves, Loewenberg explains that you're feeling a need to cleanse or relieve yourself of something negative or frustrating.

As aforementioned, water in dreams tends to represent our emotional state, so if you notice in the dream that the floodwater is murky, it could be reflecting a murky or muddied mental state. And according to Loewenberg, that can point to depression, or even not seeing a situation clearly.

If you're driving down a flooded road, Loewenberg says this can speak to an area of your life that was seemingly in progress—but has not been either put on hold or sidetracked. And whatever the reason is for that delay, it's stressing you out.

Who you're with in a dream can offer helpful clues to what the dream is trying to tell you, so if you're with someone during the flood, Loewenberg says to get clear on whether it's someone in your current life, or someone from your past.

"If it's someone that you're currently dealing with, they're likely going to be involved in the real life situation that's causing the dream. But if it's someone that you're not dealing with on a daily basis, or someone from your past, they represent some part of you—or represent something about the situation," Loewenberg tells mindbodygreen.

The best way to work through a recurring dream that you don't want to have anymore is by figuring out how it relates to your waking life. From there, you can take steps to address the issue in real life, and the dream should stop.

To that end, Loewenberg always recommends looking to the day before you had the dream, "because something from that previous day is triggering it and causing you to feel the way you're feeling in the dream. She adds that you can then assess how you felt, or any specific thoughts you had in the dream, which will likely mirror thoughts and emotions you have regarding the real-life stressor.

Once you figure out what situation your dream is representing, Loewenberg says, you can figuratively seek "higher ground." Just as you would literally seek higher ground in a real-life flood, this dream represents your subconscious urging you to keep your head above water, rise above the flood, or find a higher perspective.