The contents of dreams often perplex the awakened dreamer, filled as they are with time out of joint and obscure meanings. Dreams are crowded with the detritus of the unconscious—for Jung, a great ocean, and what Freud and Bachelard thought of as shapes that “rise from the plasticity of the imagination, an imaginary raw material like dough, or clay, or molten metal. Stuff is indeed the right word for dreams.” Jungian psychologist James Hillman notes, however, that this stuff of dreams is “not simple raw material” but is “always shaped [and] imaged.” Both psychology and folk wisdom tell us that dreams, properly interpreted, may reveal much of importance about the mind, even the cognition, of the dreamer—and sometimes beyond. If the sleeping human mind molds its living emotions and experiences into, as Hillman says, “distinct materialized shapes,” then the dreams of a fictional character are twice molded into images of significance, these perhaps seen through a watery veil and meant to be understood by the reader, if not necessarily the character.

Shakespeare's Richard III and the tetralogy of plays to which it belongs feature several powerfully prophetic dreams involving either watery environments or symbolic fluidity such as permeability of the boundary between life and death as seen through the resurfacing spirits of the unquiet dead.