Drowning shares its basic emotional logic with a stormy ocean or flood dream elsewhere on this site, but it's read as more immediate and personal, since it's happening directly to your own body rather than to the world around you.
Struggling in water but managing to stay afloat is read as coping with genuinely overwhelming circumstances — not comfortably, but managing, which is itself worth acknowledging rather than dismissing as pure distress. Fully going under and struggling to breathe is read more seriously, as feeling truly overtaken by something in waking life, whether emotional, financial, or relational.
Being rescued from drowning by someone else is read favorably and specifically — help arriving exactly when you need it most, often interpreted as a nudge to actually accept support that's genuinely available to you rather than trying to manage everything alone.
A less common but real variant — drowning calmly, without panic or struggle — is read differently by different interpreters, with some treating it as surrender to circumstances rather than active defeat, closer to acceptance than despair, depending heavily on the overall emotional tone of the dream.