I love dreams. I love to think about dreams that I've had and try and figure out why I have had them, but I have never been able to figure it out or relate it back to my life. I have very realistic dreams. It's like I can feel things and hear things. My mother has realistic dreams that leave her wondering if it was really a dream after all, but I always know the difference because my dreams have a certain layer of absurdity to them.
I have had dreams where I am in a house with a dirt floor or whose ceiling is only three feet high and you have to walk bent over. I have had a dream where I found a few pieces of paper under a mattress that suddenly multiplied until the mattress bowed from the stack underneath it. They are all very strange, but the strangest dream that has stuck with me the most was a reoccurring dream I have had for many years... probably since I was twelve.
The dream is always the same. It starts with me being a good depth underwater in the middle of the ocean with a shark swimming towards me. I turn and start swimming away from it as fast as I can towards the surface, but it's obvious I will never make it. Right as the shark is opening his mouth to bite me, I give up and let him win. I literally jump awake as he chomps down on me.
This dream has probably happened twice a week for a decade. So that is somewhere around 1,00 times in my life that I have had this dream. It's a lucid dream. I can even 'think' during it. As I'm swimming to the surface, I'm telling myself that this is stupid. The dream will always end the same way and even if I did by chance make it to the surface, I still had no way of actually getting out of the water.
With that being said, one night I changed the dream. When the shark started swimming after me, I didn't try to get away. I just stayed there and watched him as he approached. I wasn't scared and I wasn't panic as the distance closed. And right when he was within arm's reach, he stopped. He just stopped moving and we both kind of floated there for a few seconds before I woke up going “What the hell was that?”.
That was two years ago and I have yet to have that dream again. I would really love to know what it meant and it was that I apparently figured out in order for it to stop occurring. Any thoughts?
Well, what the 'changed' dream is telling me is that the only thing that we fear is fear itself. The other times you have had that dream, you have tried to swim to the surface and have panicked because you feared you would die but in the changed dream you just accepted it and got over your fear and when that shark stopped, it was like a representation of your fear no longer having a hold on you. That's what I think anyway:)
ReplyDeleteI agree with the OP and I think that the shark may have represented something that was like suffocating you, a porblem or thought or situation, and since you solved it, you faced it the same happened with the "shark". I dont know, that's my two cents haha.
ReplyDeleteAs far as my own dreams go I tend not to remember them and I never had a reoccurring one. But the ones I remember are pretty absurde too, and my nightmares are never the classic ones (being robbed, murdered or something like that) but they are pretty distressing lol.
merry christmas! :)
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