Dream: I am swimming in a pool. Maybe I am 7 or 8 years old. As I swim along, I sink down under. This seems normal to me. I don’t need to come up. My parents are watching and are concerned about me sinking under like that so they speak to the pool attendant. The person suggests to me that I swim on my back so that I can breathe. So, I swim on my back and can breathe OK but I feel a bit uneasy and would prefer to swim the way I was swimming before.
At the beginning of the dream I am under the water and don’t need to come up. Rodger explains that I am breathing the water and asks me what I am feeling there. It feels peaceful, comfortable. I want to stay there. He explains to me that in the archetypal world, breathing water signifies essence or connection with the divine. I had this connection as a girl but then I lost it. As I become concerned with pleasing my parents/society I flip over onto my back and become an air breather. I let their concern become more important than my feelings. So, I loose my essence, that place of deep connection.
breathing water = peace, essence
breathing air = uneasiness, anxiety
As many of us do, I probably had a special connection to spirit/divine when I was a young child. I was content playing by myself. I loved just being. But when I got socialized and went to school, I unlearned that or buried it. Now, I need to unlearn what the world taught me and get back to that part of myself again. That is what Rodger and the dreams are helping me to do.
We talk more about why I go from breathing water to turning over and swimming on my back and breathing air. I remember a few incidents in my early school age years that could have contributed to it. One was in kindergarten when I was sent to stand in the corner for spilling paint on my shoe. Kindergarten was one of my first experiences of being “in the world”. That incident was confusing and upsetting to me. I wonder about a connection to “the man in the corner” dream. We discuss a few other incidents that brought me a feeling of shame in 1st and 2nd grade. Although these are all “normal” incidents by anyone’s standards, they are probably moments when I went from being a spiritually connected girl to being a girl bound by society’s rules. It was when I went from being an underwater swimmer, breathing underwater to an on my back swimmer breathing air.
Homework: go underwater and become the girl again
The homework brings me to a deep place of feeling. I feel a strong feeling of love, well being and peacefulness under the water. I find that I don’t want to come up.
Recent Comments