Dream of Whales
A long time ago, I had a dream. This was back when I was a little bit younger, had a robust liaison with alcohol and was subconsciously looking under every embarrassing rock for a sense of self.
In the dream I was standing on a promontory looking out over the ocean. At this time I didn’t live near the ocean’s edge, or have access to such a variety of promontories as I have now. While standing on the promontory in my dream while looking down at the ocean, I saw some whales appear at the surface. They were swimming about and from my vantage point, I could see their bodies and fins as they rose to the surface. That was the dream.
I remembered the dream. And while it wasn’t one of those wild dreams that is so bizarre you simply cannot wait to tell someone, like the one I had recently about a small horse that had a proboscis for one ear, that vibrated at the same frequency as a hummingbird and the horse would lean its head into my chest and vibrate against my heart to show me affection, no.
This dream of whales had such a potency that I felt it had meaning. I never forgot it. I knew that should the day come to pass that I found myself on a promontory, watching whales splash around below that I would know with certainty that I was on my true path and have finally overturned the right rock to have found the self I was looking for.
Shuffle ahead a few decades and what do you know? I had moved to the Sunshine Coast and just as often as not was standing on a promontory looking out over the ocean. And wouldn’t you know, that on one of those times, there I was standing, pondering it all as I am wont to do and there my dream actualized. I saw the whales off in the distance swimming down below me.
And as the recognition of my dream in real-life cascaded over me, awash in the magnitude of having straddled the time, space and dream continuum on what was just an average Wednesday with the sun shining directly in my eyes and more than likely under-washed for such an auspicious occasion, I discovered myself feeling exactly the same as I had just moments before.
I mean, I was a little in awe of it all. I had been on the brink of executing what felt like big decisions at that time, and I accepted this as a divination, but from who or where I couldn’t say. And I was walking along “a path” in the forest but any inkling of a “true path” was still an obscure notion. The earth-shaking, soul-validating, powerful, prophetic moment of clarity I’d been hoping for, it was not.
I just walked on, pondering the meaning I can attach to my thoughts, like the whale dream, I’ve archived and preserved in memory because I know they will come to pass. Or will never come to pass again. Being human I think they call it.
Shuffle ahead another couple of years.
Well, what to make of it now when practically every venture to the side of the ocean in the Fall of 2022 is imbued with the responsibility of fulfilling a dream of deep meaning? When almost every time I stand on a promontory, the urgency of self-realization appears in an inescapable, phenomenal number of whale sightings. When a facebook page exists to point one to all the promontories with all the whale sightings, and the whales no longer content to simply circle around are now performing every nature of whale acrobatics imaginable for throngs of paparazzi?
What could it mean?
That younger version of me would have said well, that dream didn’t have meaning after all. Look at all these whales and promontories, and look how everyone is seeing them. That wasn’t for me. It was in the end, just a dream, and a boring one at that.
But in overturning all those rocks along the way, I’ve been lucky enough to find lots of treasures in the form of lessons and teachers. After all these years of moving, morphing, evolving and unraveling that this dream should be replicated over and over in life also feels steeped with meaning. As though that original dream was some sort of mystical waypoint planted by a well meaning spirit guide, a mooring to the recognition of the passage I’m making through time. It may not always be extraordinary like the humming-horse, but it has been. And it is mine.
The constancy of whales along the coast does not dilute my dream, but asks me to open, to welcome an exponential expansion of the understanding of self.
I am everywhere.
It asks me if I can transcend the concept of a path. I am the detritus along the path, each twig and fallen cone fitting into each other’s crevices in a matrix. I am the gnarled bark on the trees decorating the path, its crooked grooves and imperfections protection for the ordered system that lies inside alive, transpiring, synthesizing, respirating.
On the horizon I saw a parade of beams of mist with the sun reflecting through them, scattered. From fine columns to a disordered showering of sunlit droplets returning to the ocean visible from miles away even with just this human eye. This is breath.
Only a thin separation between how we see ourselves and the vastness of what we are, surface tension.
The majesty, their grace or adaptability; the whales seem the embodiment of those traits most of us steadfastly refuse to see in ourselves. Once again, we enjoy cognitive estrangement that allows us to forget they stink up close, just like humans do. They’ve likely got open sores, theatrics and all variety of parasitic alignments we do. Beulah breaches too much and Brad’s blow annoys his partner while she’s trying to sleep.
The analogy could be drawn to our parallel experiences. They are swimming around endlessly in the underworld emerging to breathe, to seek the light. They live down there and bear witness to all the atrocities we’ve dropped to the bottom of the ocean. And yet they persist.
And we too experience the murkiness, our breath the link allowing us to carry on, to rise.
Today I sat and watched the whales again. I ran along the shore to try and get closer and closer to them. And in doing so I wedged myself into a spot where I was almost at level with the water. Their slow surfacing, casual flip of what must be a weighty tail did mesmerize me, until I suddenly remembered I now had to walk the rocks on the shore to get back to a path up to the road. I’d checked the tide last night, I only now remembered it was about to peak and I didn’t know if I had enough land to make it back in either direction to get to a way up to the road.
The whales were gliding gracefully through the water as I looked towards my destination. This won’t be graceful. I pulled myself away from the show and started skittering across the rocks and logs like a crab.
I began my usual, casual descent into catastrophic thinking; picturing myself holding my phone above my head as I am forced to swim in the frigid water to shore, walking home soaking wet, a hypothermic spectacle lurching along Lower Road with the world’s worst-ever chaffed nipples. Or misjudging leaping a chasm slightly too large for a 49 year old woman and breaking a leg, never to be found again only 40 feet from a luxury home, my rotting corpse a posthumous pariah to the locals as its shocking aroma deters the beloved humpbacks from the area forevermore.
I remind myself to be less myself in this moment. I remember that tiny gap between myself and not-self accessed through my breath.
No chasm is too large for a 49 year-old whale-obsessed, might have eaten mushrooms for breakfast, truth seeking, dream realizing, Sagittarius beast like me to negotiate! Besides, my body is likely far too saturated with nitrates to decompose before being discovered.
I safely reach the beach laughing (and cheering) a little bit at the absurdity of my mind, at how wildly entertaining the world can be. I look back to the water as I climb my path to the road, the whales descended for now.