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The writer of this study is profoundly interested in the parallelism between the phylogeny of mankind and physiological and psychological ontogeny which nightmares of water display. Many of these dreams seem to recapitulate the birth of the dreamer. This paper, attempting to be clinical and not theoretical, can only answer a few of the fascinating questions which arise in this connection.
Life on this planet began in the tepid primeval sea of countless ages past. Then it was that, according to the Genesis story, the creative “Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” Many millions of years later, the most stupendous step in evolution was accomplished: the adaptation of aquatic life to existence on solid ground. Not since, has evolution taken a comparable stride. Yet, in our short lifetimes, we may witness often—every time a child is born—what is at least a symbolic re-enactment of this epochal event.
Human life begins in the tepid, amniotic (primeval) waters. In nine months, the embyrio passes through the principal stages—from that comparable to the amoeba to that of the “highest” vertebrate—which it took eons for the race to achieve. In birth, the child is thrown from the waters to the land, as its first land-ancestors were stranded on the shore by the ebb of the ocean's warm tides.
Thus nightmares of water can be conceived as biogenetic phenomena, akin to the phenomena of physical development from single cell to human adult, within and without the uterus. For psychotherapeutic purposes, determination of the exact mechanism through which the adult re-experiences the trauma of birth may be considered somewhat irrelevant. The present writer has postulated—on the basis of dream interpretation and, considering the absence at birth of an integrated central nervous system—that there is some sort of “organismic” memory extending to the crucial point