Shark vs Dolphin and The Great Sea

 

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Dream: I was with my brother John and we were out on a boat. We went in the water and were swimming around under the water. It was a bright sunny day and a calm sea. I could see under the water and we went quite deep. I had a moment of fear about sharks when I saw a large fish down in the distance. It was deep so it was only a shadowy figure. We couldn’t tell if it was a shark or a dolphin. Then as we were swimming back to the boat I saw a bunch of them below me and they were dolphins. One was leading the way coming up towards me. I reached out my hand to touch her but they were still too far away. I continued to reach down towards them anticipating touching their soft smooth skin.

This dream for me is a very affirming dream. It reflects how supported I often feel in my life to enter into deeper feeling, exploring the depths. It also reflects my knee-jerk, trauma induced tendency towards distrust…perhaps how I project fear and danger onto what actually might be a place of deep desire and longing. The mind says SHARK!, but what really arises is the dolphin. It is a wonderful moment in dreams where we feel our fear and stay long enough within the space to move through it and find that there is actually something quite wonderful. So, shark vs dolphin and the great sea.

Being in the water in a dream is often a profound experience for me. A moment of feeling the great unconscious, the depths, feelings/emotions, fluidity/movement, held in the vast salty womb of the great mother. In this dream, I feel the sensuality of the water on my skin, the presence of my brother and the boat as support/safety and I feel my curiosity as we dive down. As we go deeper, the water becomes a bit darker, less clear. When the shadowing figure of a larger fish comes into focus deep down, I feel fear.

Natural Dreamwork and Working with Conditioning, Habitual Patterns, Shadow

The term “conditioning” in Natural Dreamwork refers to all of the habitual patterns, behaviors, reactions and ways of being, conscious and unconscious, that we have developed to cope, survive, and protect in a world where trauma, sacrifice of self, and lack of support prevents us from opening to deeper, more vulnerable feelings and soulfulness.

Often, we may feel we “know” what our issues are, we may know our history of trauma to which we continually react, or we always feel something just doesn’t seem to work out for us and we are not sure why. We feel we can’t get to our deepest desires, or maybe we don’t even know what those desires are.

Dreams want to help us get to our soulful nature, the part of us that can feel deeply and know our own intuition by virtue of a strong connection to our felt experience and an openness to our vulnerability through those feelings. They do this using some essential functions such as revealing and invoking. A stripping away, like an onion to reveal deeper and deeper layers, and the invocation of feeling in our dream bodies so that we may “know” on a deeper intuitive level our own inner truths. I think of this as the promise of the dream.