Pool Dreams
All of the dreams start the same.
I’m terrified. I’m in or near a pool. I’m always alone.
There is something haunting about the vastness of an empty pool - the chill of the water, the stillness of it, the desperate quietness. These dreams have followed me throughout the course of my life. When I was a child, they took place in deep circular pools with no clear way out. As I got older, they began forming around real places I had spent time in - the olympic diving pool at the local rec center I went to in high school, the hot springs near my rural Idaho college town.
No matter the setting, the feeling remained the same: alone, terrified, searching.
I’ve come to understand these dreams as expressions of some of my deepest fears - fears about who I am, fears about what exists beneath the surface. Spending time with these dreams, and eventually recreating them through my work, I began to realize something unexpected: there is beauty within that fear.
There is profound growth in profound discomfort.
The pools dreams still represent the isolation and terror but beneath all that there is more than just fear - there is vulnerability, honesty, and ultimately, discovery.
