The dream:
I am canoeing down a stream with someone familiar to me, perhaps Darchelle. The stream becomes too
rocky and steep for canoeing so we continue on foot and come to a waterfall where the stream drops
into a large pool surrounded by cliffs on three sides with a rocky beach along our side. Beyond the
pool the stream flows over ledges and around the boulders a short distance then pours into a 100
foot waterfall down into another large pool. Thinking of swimming I checked out the lower pool but
the 100 foot waterfall is too big for me so I return to the beach. Bill Gates, who is with me,
decides that he wants to jump off the waterfall so he goes down there. He does not want the other
people on the beach to recognize him so I don't tell anyone who he is.
I want to swim naked but no one else is swimming so I ask a couple near me, a good-looking young man
and woman with dark skin, if other people swim naked in this pool. When they tell me that they do,
I take off my clothes and run into the water in front of both the people on the beach and people
sitting on the deck of a restaurant overlooking the pool. I dive in when I think the water is deep
enough but I misjudge the depth. The water is only 6 inches deep and I am a bit embarrassed about
that but I do the breaststroke and quickly get into deeper water.
Swimming across the pool to the other side I watch as an old porta potty, rusted out and encrusted
with barnacles, is lifted out of the water. I climb up out of the water on low cliffs at a nearby
corner of the pool. A piece of the granite cliff perhaps 6 feet tall and 3 feet across is loose so
I move to one side of it. The loose rock peels away from the cliff and becomes a large black man
dressed in a dark suit. He walks over to the far end of the pool, the water being temporarily
removed.
I swim back across the pool towards the restaurant where I notice a table and chairs set up underwater
underneath the restaurant.
My interpretation:
Revisiting this dream a year and a half later, I see a fairly clear theme of accepting and adjusting
to my limitations, some inherent and some imposed by my disability. I/we stop canoeing and walk
instead when the stream becomes too difficult. I declined to join Bill Gates in jumping off the
high waterfall. In my career I of course did not match Bill Gates either, limited not by disability
but by talent and ambition. In the dream though, like Bill I do go swimming, and I successfully
negotiate the challenge imposed by the shallow water. Swimming naked implies doing the activity in
the way that I choose to do it, true to my own standards and values. I also choose where to go in
the pool. I climb out onto the rock, perhaps representing Christianity (The black man in a dark suit
is reminiscent of a Christian preacher) but decide it is not safe for me. I regard the old porta potty,
which I associate primarily with running, but have nothing to do with it any longer. My running days
are over, but I am still swimming, still negotiating my life despite my limitations. The underwater
table and chairs suggest that dining out is no longer an option either but that is a limitation
imposed not by my disability but by our circumstances, living through a pandemic.
A sense of my agency runs throughout the dream. My actions, while constrained by my limitations, are
directed by my own choices.