Dreams Without Fear
I have this dream and it visits upon me now and again like a old friend who knows it's time to catch back up. My dream finds me in the ocean completely naked and steadily swimming in breast stroke and always away from the shoreline; I just presume there is a shoreline as I never see it to be sure. I don't start off the dream by getting into the ocean I'm always just in it and I only go forward towards nothing visible. I can't feel anything about the dream scaring me for the vast ocean is like a mill pond and I can't get a feeling that the water is cold and punishing, just me and the ocean and nothing but more ocean in front of me. My swimming strokes are completely rhythmic and almost choreographed and without any sense of oceanic sound or my own dialogue. Sadly, I always wake up just as I'm losing strength and being pulled down into the water and yet I'm as calm as the grey water that's starting to engulf me, so I don't understand what wakes me from it.
I like to think the dream is strangely foetal because I feel safe in my inevitable drowning and unborn babies don't feel scared floating about in their little buffering ocean.
Madness I know but it's got me this far..
Gertie
Life tag - Van Morrison - Into The Mystic
I remember reading a short story when I was at school about a lad who wanted to copy his friends by being able to swim through a submerged cave on the seashore. He swam around and treaded water for months until one day he felt he could do it. He swam through the submerged cave going deeper and deeper, he felt constricted, his nose started to bleed but he continued onward. Eventually his persistence was rewarded. He surfaced, battered and bloody blinking at the daylight. It was an allegory for being born. Your blog post reminded me of that story.
ReplyDeleteYou strike me as a person on a quest. Whoever you are I hope you find what you are looking for.