Water dreams

Soul speaks through our unconscious and through our dreams.  Dreams of water may be particularly potent.

Last summer at an astrology conference I had the pleasure of meeting one of my partner Joe Landwehr's friends, author and professor of Counseling Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies, Greg Bogart.  We attended a workshop he presented there on dreamwork and astrology which was refreshingly interactive and open-ended, as dreams themselves are.

This year Greg published a book called Dreamwork and Self-Healing: Unfolding the Symbols of the Unconscious (Greg Bogart, Karnac Books). I am currently enjoying the insights it adds to my own attempts to dive deeper into dream life.  I find it interesting that, until I began aquatic bodywork, dreams were rarely accessible to me.  Since then, my remembered dreams have brought strong messages.

I'm still learning to work with them, as they usually challenge me to face something that I am not facing well in my waking life.  As Greg writes:

'Dreamwork is a personalized yoga of the unconscious, a direct link to inner truth and guidance. ... Like any spiritual practices, dreamwork can awaken powerful energies within us.  We need to be prepared to respond with full commitment to each dream's provocative message.' p. 287

It seems to me that dreams don't ask for an interpretation so much as for a participation that extends into our waking lives.  I've felt that I often failed to heed my dreams, especially the warning kind.  But recently, I've begun to consider instead that they've prepare me to deal with things as best I can having already rehearsed  or anticipated situations.  Dreams are learning experiences, full of vibrant imagery.

While I am reading Greg's book, Joe is reading Conscious Dreaming: A Spiritual Path for Everyday Life by Robert Moss (1996).  One of the intriguing ideas this author puts forward is that there is no real difference between our nightly dream life and our daily waking life.  Moss suggests we can follow events in our daily lives with the same sensitivity as we use for dreams.  We are always dreaming.  Greg gives some personal examples of this in his discussion of synchronicity.

Not surprisingly, quite a number of my dreams in the last decade since I became a 'water quester' have included water.  Below I have given one-line summaries from some of these to illustrate just how varied they can be.  I have sometimes used the imagery of dreams to create poems, and have wondered about further elaborating them in healing stories.  This might well deepen the insights they offer.

 Here is what Greg Bogart says about my favorite element: 

Many dreams contain imagery of water, another archetypal element of nature.  We dream of swimming in the ocean, riding waves, moving a great speed across the water, dissolving into water, riding on rough seas, or watching large tidal waves coming in.  Each of these is an archetypal situation.  We dream we're far out at sea, or heading toward shore.  We swim through stormy tempests, wade in shallow water, test the waters, get our feet wet, nearly drown, float blissfully, immerse ourselves in water like baptism, or barely keep our heads above water.  Each of these images has different connotations.  Water dreams portray our present inner condition, our current emotional experience, and the state of the unconscious.  p. 103 Dreamwork and Self-Healing: Unfolding the Symbols of the Unconscious by Greg Bogart, Karnac Books

Dreamwork and Self-Healing: Unfolding the Symbols of the Unconscious
by Greg Bogart

Some water imagery from my own dreams

Here are some examples of the variety of ways in which water may serve as a metaphor for life challenges from my own dreams.  I have indicated circumstance but not interpretation since this is a personal endeavor and also one that I notice shifts and changes as my own consciousness evolves.

• attempting to reach a concrete island from a bleak coastline via a walkway of stepping stones where the sea is getting rougher and strange vortices are appearing (dealing with early difficulties in a relationship)

• a beautiful healthy cat beside a pond attempting to rescue another cat under the water who is ill and drowning (just before a beloved cat died from a disease involving water on her chest)

• a tsunami that prevents me from returning to my parent's pacific bungalow and takes me to an Escher-like tower of red brick (on an anniversary of my father's death)

• following my ex-husband's girlfriend over the edge of a Niagara-like waterfall on mattresses, being deeply submerged and unable to surface (after learning of betrayal)

• finding myself unable to protect special and unique water creatures in a valley from piglets on the shore who will later rip them apart (around the time of my divorce settlement)

• while on my way to India, landing unexpectedly on an island in choppy seas, to witness the retrieval of an abused dead baby (beginning my recovery from divorce; the next dreams continue this theme)

• a battle begins which seems to involve sponges, wielded by my sister and mother, as weapons

• moving through a strange rubber water conduit with soldiers, and then trying to rescue a boy drowning above a sunken city

• standing on a high gallery with stairs [resembling those in my marital home] down to a beach and being unable to rescue my cat from an incoming tsunami

• wanting to join up some water hose in the front yard of an old Victorian, determined to do it myself, but not having the right connections

• while cleaning up a wetland area/ island having weeds flung on my kitchen windows and my rubber boots strung out of reach above the island

Just as I was completing this post, I came across this poem by Rumi which seems to describe the way in which waking and sleeping, the visible and the invisible, are part of the same unending fluid of life in which we are all immersed.  It also offers consolation on the emotional journey that water often initiates.

Everything you see
has its roots in the unseen world.
The forms may change but the essence
remains the same.
Every wondrous sight will vanish
every sweet word shall fade.

But do not be disheartened.
The Source they come from
is eternal, growing, branching out
bringing new life
and new joy.

Why do you weep?
That Source is within you
and this whole world
is springing up from it.

The Source is full
its waters are ever flowing.
Do not grieve; drink your fill.
Don't think it will ever run out.
This is the endless ocean

                   Rumi, Sufi Poet and Mystic

Read more about water and dreams in this earlier post: The age of dreaming has come.