Dreaming of Sharks

I awoke with a start the morning at 4am, and realized that I'd been having a nightmare.  I often remember my dreams when I first wake up, and if I write or talk about them right away, I can still remember the details.  I told my wife about the dream, which left me quite agitated, so much that I couldn't fall back to sleep for awhile.  I ended up reading for a out an hour to try to get the dream out of my head.  Still, I realized that I might want to think about what the dream was about.  First of all, it was about a shark.  Literally, a shark.  I dreamt that I was wrestling with a shark.  It was thrashing about, and I was holding on to it, literally holding on as if I was riding the shark as it was thrashing. Think bucking bronco, but instead, a shark.  I'm sure that we were in the water, I don't know if we were under water, but I know that I didn't feel like I couldn't breath.  What really stuck with me when I woke up was that I'd been wrestling the shark.

A google search quickly suggests that shark dreams are about anger and hostility, or if they are about a person, then that person is greedy and unscrupulous.  I wonder if I've encountered anyone like that in my life? Hmmm.  It really doesn't take me very long to think about this, or to recognize the underlying cause of my nightmare.  I'm surprised that I had the dream, because usually I don't dream about things if I've actually addressed them.  I thought that I'd addressed these issues, but maybe my dream was a sign that I really haven't. At least I know that the turmoil surrounding these issues is still laying under the surface and that's important.

I have for some time struggled with anxiety.  There are days that I feel anxious, and it seems to come out of nowhere.  Maybe it really isn't coming out of nowhere.  If my dream is any indication of what is laying beneath my conscious surface, then I really shouldn't be surprised when I suddenly find myself anxious.  There's a reason.  That just means I need to focus on dealing with these feelings.  They're probably not going away anytime soon.  There's still too much real life stuff to play out for these feelings to fade into the background.  I guess I'll have to live with that.  But, that's life.  We have to live with the things that come at us on a daily basis.  We really don't have a choice.  There are always going to be sharks in our lives.  We can swim away from them.  We can wrestle with them. I suppose we can be eaten by them (though I really hope to avoid that scenario).

I've started the year with a focus on daily meditation.  The first week has focused on balance. While I don't think that there is a meditation for dealing with sharks, there are meditation foci on anger.  It could be a starting place for addressing this, as sharks definitely bring out that emotion.  I'm sure there are other emotions that are invoked as we deal with human sharks.  One thing I do know.  Anger isn't a healthy emotion to have living under the surface.  So, if I am dealing with the anger brought on by a shark, then I might as well work on addressing the anger.  It's a beginning.  We'll see what it does to my shark dreams.