feb13

Woke up from a dream just now where I was standing on a small island of rock overlooking the sky and the sea a couple meters over from land. The few clouds and the light of the sun were making shimmering patterns against the clear blue of the sky, and when I looked down at the sea I saw a flock of seagulls flying in a way that they collectively looked like a giant bird flying into the sea. I was amazed and said to myself "when did they start doing that!?", and then saw another formation of gulls in the shape of a dragon. I decided to let it go and just enjoy that there was something more awesome and beautiful in the world than before. I continued watching the water and saw giant sea turtles and serpents surfacing and settling on rocks before diving back down.

At some point I realized that the island I was on had become submerged by the rising tide. I was shocked that I hadn't noticed, and decided to swim back to the mainland. As soon as I started swimming I had the thought that I hope one of the creatures I was watching doesn't swim up to me, and right then something big, black and glossy bobbed out of the water right next to me. I felt startled and wary of it, but not overly threatened. It stayed next to me as I swam until I was back on land. Then I woke up.

A couple things struck me about this dream. First was the reappearance of a glossy black creature. In the last dream I wrote about, it took a different form but I felt it represented my fear, with my response to it in the dream reflecting my typical response to fear (fight it, run from it, treat it as a threat/nuissance).

In this dream, another glossy black creature appeared in response to the fearful thought I had but my response was different. I felt startled but didn't react to it. I basically just let it float there next to me while I continued swimming to shore. The whole way I could see it taking up the right corner of my vision, but neither of us did anything. Usually when something like that appears in my dreams, I'll initiate some kind of fight or chase that will quickly wake me up. I wouldn't have made it to the island - the scary thing (the object of fear) would have become the focus and overtaken me.

It made me wonder if it's reflecting a change in how I respond to fear. Lately I've been finding myself more quickly becoming aware that when I'm feeling anxious or afraid while thinking about something, it's not actually that whatever I'm thinking about is the threat it seems to be but that my fear is active and making something seem threatening. The person or situation that the fear is projected onto is almost incidental, or maybe a better word is symbolic. It represents something associated with a past incident, and is therefore activating my fear and appearing threatening somehow. The usual process tends to start up in which I'm trying to resolve the situation in my mind (which can be summed up as deciding how or whether to fight or flee whatever seems to be causing my fear). But usually at some point now, I realize that I'm afraid. And instead of focusing on the thing that seems to be causing the fear, I look at and stay with the fear itself and what it's doing to me. I just keep my attention on it and things start to unravel. It happens slowly but little by little I start to feel the tension in my body easing, my thoughts slow down, different feelings start to come up other than fear, and eventually it all dissolves and I can see and feel that I'm actually okay - as I always was underneath the fearful thoughts and feelings. Usually I realize I don't actually have to do anything in response to the situation I was thinking about. I neither have to fight nor flee.

When I initially woke up from the dream, I felt scared lying alone in the dark of my room. It felt scary to me, even though I've done it hundreds of times before. There was nothing to fear - there was just the fear itself. This is how it almost always truly is. There is no real danger, no real threat. There's just fear being superimposed onto something that's actually harmless, in this case an empty room. In fact, a room which was keeping my body safe while I slept.

There were other feelings too. Sadness, loneliness, grief. And I just felt them, I let the thoughts and feelings pass through without lingering on them long enough to ascribe some kind of meaning to them. And within minutes I felt relaxed again. I could see that it was just a passing wave of stories, narratives, delusions charged with old emotions.

It's a few hours later now and I still feel a bit of it in my heart, some heaviness there. I guess it'll come up when it does, and hopefully I'll be alert enough to let it come and go.