I used to have dreams about tidal waves. I mean, tidal waves that swallowed mountain ranges while I looked on helplessly or scrambled up to higher ground. Sometimes I was alone, sometimes in company. Eventually special effects software kind of caught up to the style of my dreams and by the time movies like Deep Impact and then The Day After Tomorrow were made it was like someone else had been having my dreams and turned them into movies.
They say that water in dreams is all about emotion, life force. Given that I am an emotional creature it doesn’t seem an inappropriate place to start an interpretation. I’ve always had a powerful relationship to water even when I’m awake. There is a spot on a particular beach in Vancouver where I like to stand right at the water’s edge with my feet partly in the ocean. Somehow the endless battle and caress of the water on the sand - wearing rocks into pebbles into grains - in a horseshoe of mountains staring west out to sea just makes me feel and know that it’s all going to be okay. A lot of the stuff I hold on to too tightly, chase too aggressively or not aggressively enough, all my unbidden, unexpected tears or fears just seems like nothing with my toes at that border, surrounded by what is an ancient dance of water, earth, air and sky.
Lakes have another power over me. They’ve always frightened me more than the ocean but compelled me regardless. The strange smoothness of them. How hard you have to work to swim in them, how they do not support you or help you in any way. I’ve had lakes try to drown me on more than one occasion and I’ve always forgiven them because they provide good things and a challenge and an unparalleled coolness in the heat, all kinds of heat - internal, external.
I am also enamoured of rain. I love to get soaked. To walk barefoot on warm wet summer pavement with rain that hits so hard you get more wet as it bounces back up then when it is falling down in the first place. Gentle mists that coat then soak you have their place too and I am just generally more fond of rain than I am of its more chilly cousin snow.
Which is why the avalanche came as a surprise this morning.
I have never before dreamt of an avalanche.
In the dream, I was driving in a car with an old friend I haven’t seen or spoken too since I was a teenager and of whom my strongest memory is that her last boyfriend was a know-it-all jerk and another friend whose most recent council to me was to be as free and open to things as I possibly could. It doesn’t take a Freudian dictionary to see Super Ego and Id at work here but whatever… We’re driving along in a convertible and my Super Ego friend is telling me I’m making an illegal turn while my Id friend is kind of just rolling with the fact that I’m on the wrong side of the yellow line…
There really isn’t much traffic so I get back to where I need to be easily enough and feel more okay with my initial recklessness than I do with correcting it. My Super Ego friend is still kind of yammering at me - they are both in the back seat - and I turn quickly to look at her like, “Enough already, I’m on the right side of the road now.” When there is a catastrophic roar and all the cars in front of us are wiped perpendicularly across the road in front of us and down a hill by a furious rush of snow and rocks.
I hit the breaks at the edge of the mostly still mess and we all look up to more coming. More roar, more snow. We would have been completely buried - all three of us - if I hadn’t lifted something to hold up as they both cowered behind me. I think the dream may have become more lucid at this point because I felt like I had taken control of it somehow… Otherwise how on earth could I have deflected an avalanche from killing us with what mostly appeared to be a supersize box of Cheerios? But whatever.
The avalanche kept coming in waves and I was solely responsible for protecting my Super Ego and Id friends. I would deflect what I could and then dig us out - the car was full of white and debris and at a certain point I myself was so buried that all I saw was white. A disorienting shroud of white. I surfaced to sunlight, though and helped my sputtering, terrified friends.
Out of curiosity, and because I honestly have no trouble believing that certain unconsciously generated symbols might mean generally similar things across cultures and time - I looked up “avalanches” in online dream dictionaries. This is the most cohesive and least intimidating of the definitions I found:
The material which makes up the avalanche is snow, and snow is frozen water. Water symbolizes your emotions, the unconscious, and, at times, life itself. Therefore, this dream is about rapidly and violently descending emotions and thoughts. Emotions which may have been repressed have finally been unlocked and may be overwhelming you. You may have this dream during emotionally turbulent times of your life, or in your dreams you may be remembering and reliving some difficult emotional experiences. Old dream interpretation books say that burial in an avalanche may result in good luck in the near future. Therefore, they think that it is a dream of the contrary.
borrowed from HERE
The one other detail I found is that it depends on whether it you being buried or others being buried whether or not it is a good omen. If you are buried it is a good omen. If others are buried it probably means you will have a change of surroundings. Given that I just moved I’m going to stick to interpretation rather than prophecy I think. Plus it was me AND my friends who got buried (unless we see them as being all parts of me I suppose…).
Anyway - it was a powerful and unexpected dream that I’d never had before and if any of you fine folk would like to take a stab at interpreting it for me I would of course relish that so please do get to some mad busy interpreting!!!
