You are facing a killer
wave, rushing at you like a moving mountain of water. You are fleeing from it,
but you can't escape and it crashes over you, pushing the air from your lungs
and you surface from sleep terrified and gasping for breath.
This is a rather
widespread experience in sleep dreams. I've heard versions of it from hundreds
of dreamers. What's going on here?
You could be dreaming of
something that will blow up in your life with the emotional force of a rogue
wave, even a tsunami. The dream may be a prompt to look at the kind of
situations in your regular like that threaten to overwhelm you, and how you can
better cope when those situations arise. This may lead you to shape a survival
strategy that is simple as this:
- Remember to breathe
- Let the storm wash over you
- Put yourself in a
protective bubble
Then again, your dream
of a killer wave could also be a psychic preview of a natural disaster. Many
people shared dreams with me in advance of Hurricane Katrina and the terrible
Asian Tsunami of December 2004 that appear to have been rather exact
precognition of coming calamities. There is nothing strange about such
premonitions. We are connected to all life on the planet, and mass events cast
a shadow before them in the collective mind. Let's notice that a dream of a
tsunami - or any other natural disaster - may be both personal and transpersonal.
It may symbolize overwhelming stress or emotional drama in your life and also contain a vision or
preview of an external event.
My research into
the evolution of J.R.R. Tolkien's mythic imagination has led me to think about
another possible context of understanding for dreams of a giant wave. The
author of The Lord of the Rings was haunted by a recurring
dream that first came upon him in early childhood, of a great wave that
overwhelms a whole country and hurls its people and cities into a rift in the
earth. In a letter written near the end of his life, Tolkien say this about the
"ineluctable Wave" that came upon his again and again:
I had the dreadful dream
of the ineluctable Wave, either coming out of the quiet sea, or coming towering
in over the green inlands. It still occurs occasionally, though now exorcised
by writing about it. It always ends by surrender, and I awake gasping out of
deep water.
Tolkien became convinced
that his dream of the Wave (note his upper case) came out of "ancestral
memory" of the fall of Atlantis. By his own account, he only escaped the recurring terror of the Wave when he attributed his dream too Faramir (the character in The Lord of the Rings he said was most like him, "except for the courage") in The Return of the King. Tolkien did not see the dream of the Wave as symbolic. He thought it was a vision across time of the actual cataclysmic event, one he was called to remember and chronicle.
We are not
condemned to go on being drowned or overwhelmed, in our dreams or in our lives.
A dreamer with whom I have worked reported a very happy evolution in her
initially terrifying dreams of a monster wave after she began to practice our
Active Dreaming techniques, which include going back inside a scary dream -
wide awake and conscious - and seeking to confront and resolve the fear on its
own ground, which in this case is the flooded beach or the seabed.
When she agreed to go
back into a dream of being drowned by a killer wave, she found that she was
able to imagine herself inside the protection of a glass bubble. As the wave
crashed over her, her heart pounded but she was able to breathe. She stayed in
this scene until the wave receded. Later, in a spontaneous night dream, she
discovered - to her amazement and joy - that her dream self could actually
catch the wave, and ride it. She carried the happy energy and poise from this
dream into waking life situations that had previously overwhelmed her with a
sea of emotion.
Even if we feel we can't
change the dream of the monster wave, we can learn from Tolkien to borrow its
raw energy and apply it to creative work. It is hardly an exaggeration to say
that with out his terrifying dreams of the "ineluctable Wave",
Tolkien might not have been driven to give the world his greatest work.
Graphic: "The Fall of Numenor" by Darrell Sweet
2 comments:
I posted a day ago on the bibliomancy related to a dream I had on 11 23 93. Whilst it began with the image of being drowned, it evolved to standing on broken glass in the center of a city which was being destroyed. I was barefoot and understanding was at my feet. Broken glass from the buildings had fallen, a shard of glass tore into the sole/soul of my foot, and I began to awaken. The monster who was he'll bent on destroying the city, had commanded his servants to to also destroy me. Death and destruction, rang out in all directions. The bright red devilish looking flying creatures came towards me. The sights,sounds and smells of death encircled me...yet I saw God everywhere. In that instant I began to rise. I became as a winged one. From drowning,to standing, to flying...and onward into communion and later union. The monster sent his servants out to take me down. However, blood from the soul/ sole of my foot fell upon one of the monsters servants and he fell. The other servant made a hellishly frightened sqauking sound and flew away. They had lived too long in the land of fear. By surrendering 1st to the water, then to what appeared upon the Earth,I began to remember.
I will stop the dream recall here for now and save for another time. Thank You Robert for this blog post of today. I am so grateful! Wanda
Hello Wanda if this were my dream I would see it as a very vivid dramatization of key elements of the tragedy of 9/11, and maybe also of our current collective situation. Mass events cast long shadows ahead of them. May we find our way in alignment with earth and sea and with higher powers - and remember that in dreams we can fly.
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