dream walkings

Marin December 2024

Last night for the first time in a very long while I dreamt of breathing under water. Of being forced under water, and as the coolness enveloped me with its solidity, discovering that I could breathe there. It was a force of nature, not a person that caused me to go down and under. I have never dreamt of being pushed in. I have dreamt of intentionally jumping from some place very high, too high just to save my own life. Then comes panic for the surface always with a finite and exact conclusion.

This is a powerful dream, one I have had many times, and one of my favorites – as soon as I discover I can breathe that is. Before that realization it is one of my biggest fears – the deep dark terror. These dreams usually come at times of transformation in my life. Times when even air is hard to breathe. A very human experience, transforming, breaking through – sometimes breaking down or apart – and then coming through on the other side into something previously unimaginable.

Now I sit at the ocean’s edge on a perfectly beautiful day, drawn here by my dream. Monster waves crash in from two different angles creating this apex of rock and sand that I perch on. There is a serious set coming in and the undertow is wicked – the stuff of nightmares. Resembling the seeming unending troubles and worries rolling into my life at the moment – dimming the sun.

This beach is all reds, greens, yellows, and blues – tiny pebbles smoothed to a perfect polish by time. Are we like these pebbles being transformed by life? As the frothy caress recedes, the shore alights and shines like a zillion diamonds, or uncountable bright stars packed tightly together in the inkiest black of the night sky. Locked in tight, like the love for my children that bursts through my chest, breaking ribs along the way.

The small pebbles feel cool and refreshing to my bare feet. Grounded here, my connection is viscerally restored. I am resisting the urge the sift through the rocks for treasures to fill my pockets as I normally do. But – now is not a time for collecting of anything for me. It is a time of letting go and opening up, receiving, giving in a different way.

The universe tugs at my chest, I feel the energy pushing and pulling – what comes next? I hear, feel, understand the call but am surrounded by a language I do not yet understand.

I dream of becoming something wild, then I remember that I already am, but I get lost in the fog, the doubt, the illusion. The surface of the water is so close, light and oxygen draw me up. So radically close I can taste it.