The Splash: Dreaming of Paradoxical Paradise

In my house there is a painting, a fake painting done by a friend of my Dad’s, but a painting nonetheless. This painting is practically life size and looks identical to the original.

The original: The Splash by Hockney

David Hockney: Modern Pop artist born in 1937 on July 9^th, which is 61 years and 13 days prior to when I was born. He was known for painting pools. Summer pools with people swimming below the ripples–bright happy opaque undiscriminating colors.

Color: The focal point to the dream that reminded me of this painting.

The pool was clean, I mean, chlorine-stinging-your-eye-balls clean, and the sky was blue, the type of blue with no clouds and a perfect sun you would only see in a drawing by a 1^st grader. It was warm. It was like the summers in Palm Springs I used to spend with my parents and grandparents and great-grandparents.

However, it wasn’t really like the Palm Springs memories at all, because beneath all the bright blues and pinks and yellows of the sun, I found myself completely alone, which, in all honesty, I rather enjoyed (at the time being).

I looked over the edge of the concrete and into the pleasant pool, which most certainly seemed like the quintessence of pleasure.

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I jumped and created the splash.

It was that type of jump where you brace yourself for the cold water that never is as bad as you first assume it to be. The kind where you let out a airy laugh to yourself before taking that step, knowing you are forcing yourself stupidly into unnecessary pain.

However, this splash, this fall, this drop, this moment, this air, was different.

The splash sounded like dull wallops tickling my ear drum as I fell, or rather dropped like a stone, to the bottom of the pool while simultaneously realizing that at this moment I had no air in my lungs.

I took a few seconds, as if searching through my lungs to check if I did in fact forget to breath before I jumped.

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Well, what the cuss!? Are you kidding, Terra? I actually forgot to breath before jumping. Did I have the brain capacity of a 90 year old on life support? Was my mind so preoccupied with the imminent frigidity before the jump that I forgot to do what I have been doing for roughly 8, 935, 200 minutes? (Surprising how short that time feels).

I sat at the very bottom of the pool where everything was now a darker blue. I looked up and the blue sky blasted through the opening directly above me as the remnants of the splash waved the light that flickered through to the bottom.

Swim, I thought.

Believe me, I tried. I moved my arms and legs like I was having a seizure down there, but I just didn’t seem to have enough oxygen, or rather too much C0₂, to get anywhere.

What came to my mind next is actually what strikes me, is actually what bears any meaning to real life, in this dream.

My thought: Someone help me.

I shook while floundering, wondering, pleading, if anyone would save me. Where is my Mom? Where is my Dad? Anyone!

Then it hit me. Earlier in the dream I was completely alone in this summer paradise. (Weird to recognize that this is a memory of a memory).

My thought: Alone.

So, what now? I have to save myself even though I feel as though I can’t. I look around while my throat and lungs felt as though they must breathe in something, even if that something is water. To my right a see a ladder that allows people to wade into the pool so that the coldness of the pool doesn’t hurt so much (I never found this any less painful, if not more, than jumping). I wrangled my body about vigorously.

What I see last is my right arm stretched far in front of me, grabbing for the ladder. After that, blackness.

I have never died in a dream prior to this one. You know those games, morbid games undoubtedly, where you and your friends contemplate the best way to die. I can say hands down that drowning is never in anyone’s top 10. Do you know why?

Not to mention the complete loss of control, but the slowness of suffocating that allows you to realize the situation you are in, the reason for your death.

For me, the realization was that I was alone. Absolutely indisputably alone. My isolation was paradise, but I guess it is possible to forget to breathe when you’re in paradise for too long. Nobody is going to let you know when you’re drowning. My Dad sometimes tells me, not out of the blue for I would be worried, that when people die from heroin, it is often because they are in such a state of pleasure that they forget to breath and suffocate.

I’m not on heroin, don’t worry, you would be able to tell if you saw me.

Truth to reality is that I didn’t feel like I was stranded in paradise. I felt alone and recovering from intense depression. The best I could have hoped for at the time.

Water in dreams is said to symbolize your emotional state.

Okay, so, my emotions are pure and placid. I am calm.

Dying in dreams is said to symbolize a rebirth in waking life.

Well, I’m glad to hear it isn’t an omen.

To analyze this dream, which I have been periodically remembering for a year or more, I would have to say that I am fixing myself. My deep problems, the stuff that I don’t share with anyone, the part that I isolate myself in, is the deep end of the pool. I sank to that darkest part. I asked for help and received none. I realized I was the only one who could help myself. I tried. I, however, did not fail. Okay, so, yes, I guess I did die. But if death in dreams were rebirth, I would say that I actually succeeded.

I fell to my most broken emotional state and had to confront it face to face. Then I was reborn.

March of 2015: Oh, cuss! It’s 7:30, I need to get my coffee and start the day.