I’ve been having these recurrent dreams lately.
I’m walking straight into the ocean. I imagine my feet feeling the cold subtle waves kissing my ankles. The air is just about the perfect amount of crisp breeze and salty sways. The sun is just setting in the horizon and the sky is composing the brightest hues of purples, blues and pinks anyone could ever imagine. Everything in the beginning is calm, sweet, romantic. It’s the perfect dream.
In this dream, the ocean is a metaphor of an eternal state of happiness and well-being. My goal is to reach the ocean on my own. So, I find myself alone, walking straight into the ocean. My necessity to reach it grows stronger with each step. I’ve never felt so eager, so energetic, so willing to achieve something this deeply. I belong in the ocean, everything will be fine in the ocean.
Suddenly, from being in such a state of ease and tranquility, anxiety arises in me. Urgency and panic start to fill my limbs and my lungs. The view of the ocean is right in front of me, it almost seems as if I could reach out and splash the waves with my finger tips, but with each step I take, the less I get to where I want to go. Where I need to go. The ocean. I make sure I am walking straight, being extremely cautious, avoiding the small obstacles of the sandy ground, doing what ever I can to not loose my determination on getting where I need to be, but as with each step I take my irrational fear and anger take over and consume me. Fear of not being able to get where I want to be and anger because as much as I am trying I just can’t reach it.
At the beginning I was alone, but now people start to surround me. All I see now are unknown faces; all I hear are unknown mumbles. I try to not let them distract me from my purpose. My purpose to reach the ocean. But they start to accumulate, they start blocking my path, their voices reverberate in my ears and in my mind, and they move with such agility and speed it’s makes me nauseous.
These people seemed content in my dream. But in my mind they were faking it in some way. I just registered hypocritical laughs and ignorant smiles. How could they be so happy if they are not in the ocean? How could they conform with just the shoreline? How do they not feel the curiosity and desire to fill themselves with the vast beauty of the sea? It’s freedom what they lack and what I’m in such need to find.
I don’t want to be near these people, for these people are conformist. I do not want to be a conformist. I do not want to live a life of fake relationships in an overly controlled world. They don’t know what happiness is in their limited life, they don’t know the ocean even though they have it such in their reach.
A wave of changes come and I’m finally in the ocean. Happiness and self-power overwhelms me; I have reached where I so much desired to be. But I notice something missing inside of my soul. I feel incomplete. But, why? How, if I have finally gotten to the ocean? I’m in it and I’m supposed to feel totality. Then I remember all of the people I left behind, all of them who where enjoying their life, not being consumed by this selfish eagerness inside of me because that is what it was. I was in such a hurry to to reach my goal that I pushed them all to the side and I just thought of my needs.
I turn to the shoreline and I look for a soul whom I can share this with me but I see nothing. No soul, no shoreline; just water, and the midnight starless sky. I am alone. I am alone in the ocean and I let it the waves allure me deeper in and I let the ocean just consume me.