Shark Tales from where fresh water meets the salt

 

Jenner-Sebastopol, California

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The little California town of Jenner hangs from the cliffs where the Russian River meets the Pacific. Approach it from the south, following the bends of Highway 1, and you'll come to a sign that states that the population is 107, which seemed like a fine number to me. Drive through Jenner and return from the north, and you'll be informed by the sign at that end of town that the population is 170. That's a pretty big difference.
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I pulled up at the River's End for clarification and liquid refreshment. "This seems to be liminal territory," I remarked to the civilized bartender as he worked the tap on a local amber ale. "You have a floating population."
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"Our sign painter is dyslexic," he said. "The census might clear it up, or might not." In fact, Jenner is famous for one type of floating population: the harbor seals that gather here in great numbers in May. I was a few weeks too early to see them.
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Out on the deck, I inspected the place where the Russian River - slow and gentle at this point, but feared for sudden floods twenty miles up stream - meets the ocean. A place where fresh water meets salt water is liminal in one of the most important and mythic senses. In imaginal geographies, this is often a preferred point of entry into the Otherworld. In my many years of leading retreats at the Esalen Institute, down the California coast at Big Sur, I often had participants study how the cold, fresh water of the creek splashing down through the ravine, meets the Pacific, among the rocks. Then, with the aid of shamanic drumming, I would invite them to take off from this point in a visionary journey to make the crossing to the Other Side, have timely and helpful communication with people on the other side of death, and learn about conditions in the afterlife through first-hand experience.

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"I've seen sharks come up the Russian River," says the bartender when I go back inside. "Of course, they don't stay for long."

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Could that be a great white out there, among the whitecaps? I'm not sure, though I've heard that great whites breed in these waters and are often seen. But I've felt the nearness of the shark since I arrived in California. The night before Jenner, a woman shared what she called the most powerful dream of her life. Swimming in a warm ocean, she found something brushing against her and discovered it was a great white. The shark told her it would protect her and proceeded to open its jaws and hold her inside its mouth. She rested there, safe and cozy as a baby in its crib, throughout the night and rose in the morning feeling wonderful.

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I asked her if anyone in her family or circle of friends had been challenged by cancer. She mentioned a couple. I observed that if this were my dream and my family situation, I might feel that I had not only been granted the personal protection of a powerful ally, but might be able to draw on this relationship to help others. The shark rarely develops cancer, and I have found that if I can encourage a cancer patient to picture a shark swimming through the courses of her body, devouring the cells of her disease, she often does better. The shark dreamer wanted to explore this.

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When I got to Sebastopol from Jenner and spoke at Copperfield's that evening, I told a story of transferring the healing power of the shark to a cancer patient. In the morning, swimming in circling loops for two hours in an outdoor pool, I enjoyed the sensation of drawing the shark power close. When I arrived to open my "Dreamgates" workshop on Saturday morning, a car pulled up in front of me with a window decal that read "THUNDER SHARKS."

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My workshop host told me she had dreamed within the past week of an happy and empowering encounter with several kinds of shark, including the Australian sawtooth shark, the most primal and ferocious member of the species. This very ancient Aussie aquatic killing machine has something like a chainsaw on its nose and can pursue its prey - who might include both humans and crocodiles - up freshwater creeks by pumping out a saline solution that produces the salt water it needs. Now that's a bloody shark, mate!

- from my Travel Journal for April 11, 2010

Drawing: "Great White Breeches" by Robert Moss. From a dream of March 11, 2023

Claim the gift of nightmares

Dreams are not on our case; they are on our side. This is one of my personal mantras about dreams and (yes) it applies even to nightmares.

     In my personal lexicon, a nightmare is not only a "bad" or scary dream; it is an interrupted or aborted dream. We are so frightened we run away. We wake ourselves up and try to slam the door on the dream experience, hoping that it is "only" a dream and can't get out and come after us.
     This is a very foolish strategy. The challenges we face in dreams are challenges that are being presented by life itself. If we learn to confront the underlying issues inside the dream space, we may be able to prevent those issues from blowing up in our regular lives. This may require us to take action in waking life, based on what we have learned in our dreams; but we will lack the essential data required for appropriate action if we have left the dream broken and abandoned, behind that door we are trying to keep shut.

      Common forms of the nightmare include:

The nameless terror.

The intruder.

Being pursued.

Being attacked by a wild animal.

Suffering an infestation of bugs, spiders or bats.

An unwanted encounter with the dead.

Being attacked by vampires, demons or zombies.

Being overwhelmed by a giant wave or a twister.

Being in a plane crash or an auto accident.

You probably have your own version. We have different lives, different characters, and different styles of dreaming (another reason why you will never find the full meaning of dreams by looking them up in a dream dictionary). My own least favorite dreams are ones in which I am stuck in a place where I don't want to be.

     Whatever the content of the dreams you flee from, the Rx is the same: try to learn to confront the challenge on the ground where it is presented. This requires firm intention and some degree of courage. You want to learn to go back inside a dream you fled and try to clarify and resolve what is going on there. You can accomplish this through the dream reentry technique explained in several of my books, including Conscious Dreaming and Active Dreaming.
      You want to give a name to that nameless dread. You want to know whether the plane crash was literal or symbolic and, either way, what you need to do to avoid it. You want to establish whether that dream intruder is someone who could literally break into your house, or a disease that could invade your body, or an aspect or yourself - maybe even your Greater Self - that is trying to get your attention. If you are scared of dream vampires, you want to think about who or what in your life may be draining your energy; if your dream house is infested, you need to know whether this reflects a condition in your body that may need medical attention.

       I think it's like this: our dream producers are constantly trying to alert us to things essential to our health, wholeness and well-being. When we ignore these messages, they resort to special effects to get our attention. If we persist in ignoring the messages, the problem the nightmares reflect is likely to show up in our regular lives. Nightmares are a gift in the way that a smoke detector going off in the middle of the night - when there is a real fire hazard - is a gift.

       Sometimes we find that what we are fleeing in dreams is an aspect of our own power. When I first started living in rural New York, I dreamed repeatedly of a giant bear that came into my bedroom. He did not menace me, but he was so much bigger than me that he scared me. Finally, I told myself (as I would now counsel anyone) that I needed to go back inside those dreams, confront the bear, and discover why he was in my space. When I did that, the bear caught me up in his great embrace and showed me that we were joined at the heart, reassuring me that when I needed healing for myself or others, he would be there. I later learned that the bear is the great medicine animal of North America, and he has kept his promise.

       I have worked with several people challenged by cancer who fled from sharks in their dreams. When they agreed to swim in those dream water through conscious dream reentry, they were able to claim the shark as an ally in healing. The shark, an impeccable killing machine that rarely gets cancer, is indeed an extraordinary ally in healing cancer. But to claim that kind of power, we are first required to brave up.

       In summary: the best remedy for nightmares is to summon the courage and the necessary guidance and protection to go back in, face the source of the fear on its own ground, and stay with the experience until you achieve resolution. If reentry is no longer an option (because the dream is mostly gone) do things that help you to spit out (literally) and shake off (literally) the negative legacy, ground yourself with the good Earth - and make it your intention not to succumb to dread next time. What we most fear is often what we most need to face,

Art: "Shark Woman" by Aniela Sobieski.

Here, everything is dreaming

Moe’uhane

Island Dreaming

Dreaming is soul sleep

but even more it’s traveling.

You may fly across the water

in your body of wind

following the drumming of the waves

to spend the night with your dream lover.

Even goddesses do this.

Pele left her lava bed for three days

to make love with her dream prince.

Being a goddess, she could bring him home.

It’s harder for humans. Spend too long

with your dream spouse

without bringing him home

and you sicken like rotting silver.

You need to check who you’re sleeping with

because spirits take many forms.

If your prince is a water imp in disguise

you’ll go fish belly white and moist

on the side that rests next to him.

You must learn the vocabulary of dreams.

Never confuse a wild goatfish dream

that begins and ends in your belly

with a dream that comes true

because it’s the memory of a trip to the future.

Don’t mix up a wishing dream with revelation.

Be alert to the visions that open and shut

like lobster pots, quick and true,

on the edges of sleep and waking.

Use the dreams that are given to heal a family

and dreams that show you how to heal yourself.

In beauty and terror, as redbirds or lovely sharks,

as windflowers or razorbacks or honeycreepers,

gods and ancestors are talking, talking.

They show us life’s hidden springs.

They compose songs in us. They give

night names for babies that are coming.

They save our skins when they are worth saving.

Learn to discern when you can sweeten a dream

and soften the sharp future it portends

and when you have to swallow it straight up.

For a second opinion, listen to the birds

or to a bird-man who talks to the wind

or might sail a blossom canoe for you

over submarine tattoos in a gourd filled with water.

In the islands, everything has a body of wind.

In the morning garden, you notice the pandanus

has walked to the far side of the pond

where the fish dream open-eyed;

a palm swapped places with an avenging angel.

Even the land snail goes flying at night

and is the preferred scout of the fiercest goddess.

To become a native of these islands

you must grow double vision, reading signs

in the world and the world-behind-the-world

without going crazy. Persevere

and all your dramas will lead

to the Place of Leaping

where fresh water meets salt water

and you’ll drop your old body

and travel on, as bird or fish or zephyr

to the land tourists never see on the horizon.

Here, everything is dreaming.

On a white beach in the early light

a shark came out of the waters

and became a graceful silver woman

who claimed me as her mate,

there on the embracing sand.

She was so lovely I was not put off

by her hammerhead eyes.

I wonder what unexplainable love child

is swimming out there, in the deep.