I dream a lot. I like dreaming, and I like my dreams. I find them fascinating little peaks into my mind.
A couple weeks ago I had a particularly intense dream, full of strong symbols, which I wrote up to share with people on Facebook. There was some interesting comments about the symbology of the dream and what it meant, but not all comments were that way.
An old friend, Mithril, responded with “or maybe the dreams are just creative little segways and only significant in your reaction to them…”
I thought about her comment all day. I had this grand response I’d created to tell her about my views on dreams, because I had been thinking she said something that meant that dreams are meaningless. However, when I sat down to craft this response, I realized I was way off on my interpretation of her words, and didn’t say anything. Her comment has been floating around, somewhere in the back of my mind, ever since then.
I’d been trying to formulate what I really wanted to say about dreams, life, and in some way or another, what I feel about everything. For me, they really are all the same.
It was intense; I sat with it; and today I had a congealing of these thoughts – which this post is about.
The Elephant in the Pond of the Damned
Yesterday, I had a dream. It was a dream that had an elephant in it, and, at least at this point in my life, the elephant is a rare and particularly poignant dream symbol to me. I can only clearly remember dreaming about an elephant three times.
The first time was almost a year ago: I dreamt I was on a beach, on a hill of sand that the ocean water was coming right up to. A particularly large wave came, hitting the sand, and exploded above me creating a veritable wall of water that just hung above me.
I poked my hand through the wall. I poked my head through the wall. Then I stood up (I had been lying on my stomach). The wall went around my torso as I stood into a clearing.
This moment was very powerful for me as it was both symbol and signpost of a breakthrough into a completely different reality for me – not just in this dream but in my waking life as well. It was subtly powerful.
After crossing the water boundary, I started to look around, and I noticed what looked like an outhouse next to a marshy pond. I walked towards it, and the pond, and as I approached, I noticed a sign in the water.
Now, this sign wasn’t simply sticking out of the water, because it may not have had the impact it was. It was on a marshy alter of sorts: there was a relief, moss all about, and skulls. The most prominent looked like the classical cattle skull seen in so many depictions of the old west, but there were others like small rodents and possibly a full snake skeleton. The sign itself, hand-written in white paint, said: “The Pond of the Damned”.
I don’t necessarily believe in hell – the concept is nonsensical to me, just like the concept of heaven. I don’t have a particular attachment to the idea of being damned, and quite frankly, this is the only time in my entire life I had ever had the concept of being damned so explicitly used. I was a little confused by what being at the Pond of the Damned meant, especially considering my recent breakthrough.
I think this is a good point to mention this: I dream about water all the time. It started almost two years ago, and has been in the vast majority of the dreams I remember since then. I feel strange when I DON’T dream about water in some form. Frequently, I review my dreams to discover where the water is.
The Dream Moods A-Z Dream Dictionary (a resource I have used heavily over the last few years) says this about water: “To see water in your dream, symbolizes your unconscious and your emotional state of mind. Water is the living essence of the psyche and the flow of life energy. It is also symbolic of spirituality, knowledge, healing and refreshment.” The dream dictionary says more about how to interpret what the water means in the dream by its state, giving many examples, which are useful, but open to interpretation like any dream symbol. I’ve dreamt about water so much that I no longer read the definition and create my own interpretation. The emotion carried by the water in my dreams is almost always so apparent to me that I can usually feel the emotion / meaning that it expressed without having to dig too deep. This wasn’t always the case, but the water is much less turbulent for me nowadays.
I looked into the Pond of the Damned and it was dark, murky, and green. I saw alligators swimming about. Somewhere, deep down in the water, was a light. The best I can describe how this appeared is that it looked like a light you would see in a swimming pool, if the pool hadn’t been cleaned in a very long time and was full of algae and other gunk. However, other than the color and alligators, the water appeared very clear.
Down near the bottom of the pond I saw an elephant. He’s reared up as you would see if an elephant were about to charge, however, I think he was just floating there, in some form of stasis.
An alligator swam up to the elephant, and appeared to whisper something into its ear. This was super intense for me to notice.
I suddenly had the feeling I was being watched, and turned around to see an alligator sitting right next to me. It started to come at me, but rather than responding fearfully, I played with it. The best I can describe this is that I played as I imagine a monkey who has absolutely no fear of the alligator would play. I casually waited until it was almost right on top of me and hopped out the way. I proceeded in this fashion for a short while, until I looked up and noticed my best friend, Joe, staring at me with a shocked look on his face. I suddenly realized the enormity of the situation I was in, the danger, etc. and promptly woke up.
I’ve thought about this dream a lot since then. The elephant being one very important part, but before I go there, there is another part I’d like to go over first. That element is the portion of my waking reality that was contained in this experience - the look on Joe’s face and my realization of the reality I was in. I’ve seen it before: in perhaps the worst moment of my life.
It was in August of 2006, the exact date I don’t remember, but I’m sure I could find it if I cared to do the digging. I had been married to the woman of my dreams for five-months. It had been great, but not ideal. We were struggling in some areas, financially mostly, but had just made a breakthrough in trust.
I left for the weekend to go camping with some friends. The night before we left for the mountains, we went out drinking at a bar in my old college town. It was a great reunion, Joe, Travis, Heidi, and I. We were all off living our “grown-up” lives, and hadn’t seen each other is some time. We celebrated each others presence with many drinks before stumbling back to Travis and Heidi’s.
Along the way, we happened across a child’s playground. Joe, Heidi, and I began to swing; Travis got bored and stumbled home by himself. When swinging bored us, we moved off into the grass.
I don’t recall exactly how things escalated; I remember Joe and Heidi were on the ground – they were having “play sex”. We were all laughing, I had my phone camera out and was taking blurry, wobbly pictures that didn’t make any sense to me the next day. Somehow, I transitioned into Joe’s position, and then somehow I was making out with Heidi - and it wasn’t play.
I honestly don’t remember how it started – it is a huge black spot in my memory. What I do know is that this moment was the beginning of the end of my marriage. When I later told my now ex-wife about the experience, on my return from the camping trip, she almost left me immediately.
While I was away, our breakthrough in trust had created a new opening in her life. She had an amazing weekend attempting to start a new business for herself; she was full of life and full of love. Learning of what I had done was like dynamite to her foundation. Our breakthrough became a source of pain from which we would never recover as a married couple.
In the moment I realized what I was doing, I was crushed. A year later, we were filing for divorce, and I was headed for what would be the most depressed and, strangely, inspiring year of my life. Somewhere, during that year, I started dreaming about water.
The moment I referred to in my dream about the Pond of the Damned, the one in which I saw the look on Joe’s face, I think I’ve seen it before. Although I can’t say I clearly saw it with my eyes in the experience with Heidi, the feeling I have from Joe in that moment of the dream reflects what Joe has told me about his experience of me and Heidi kissing in the park.
My reaction in both dream and reality to the look on Joe’s face is the same as well – utter horror at what I was doing. In one world, I got to wake up.
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