A while back, a friend sent me the following dream:
I was in and out of the water all night – don’t know why, and I wasn’t fighting it. Swimming and or boating as I remember. At one point I had to leave to go do something, and when I came back the water had a thin layer of ice on it. I remember thinking that this was strange because it wasn’t cold out. I looked across the water and I saw fins break the surface of the ice. Kind of looked like sharks, but I knew them to be whales – maybe Orcas. Not menacing – just there. Then – and here’s the weird part, I looked close to shore and saw penguins swimming under the water. One of them, looked at me, (and now it gets REALLY weird), and took on sort of a “human” persona – a small child – but still a penguin – kind of said, “goodbye” to me, (no idea how, but he did), and then in a real excited, fashion took off to join his friends. I was fine with it. I almost joined him, but watched him swim off.
Then my friend asked if the penguin represented one of his children, a young teenager.
I sent the following response with my projections:
For me, the water is both the unconscious and emotion, and the crust of ice is a barrier I’ve erected to not experience my unconscious/emotional life fully. I do this because it’s overwhelming to get into it fully, so it’s a protective maneuver for me. The whales are a loaded symbol. For me, they’re always (at one level at least) about my true calling in the world. Like Jonah in the whale, he’s brought through a dark time to the very place God wanted him to be, even though he tried to avoid the call. The lesson here is that we don’t have a lot of choice about what we’re called to do in this life. We’re going to end up there one way or another.
The penguin/child is fascinating. Male Emperor penguins hold their eggs on their feet to protect them from the ice for two months, so I see a lot of nurturing energy in this. The question you had at the end about the penguin being your child is intriguing–remembering that everything in the dream is “me” but is also multi-layered symbology, I have to say that in my dream the penguin saying goodbye could be a symbol of my child growing up (the teen years are all about differentiation from the parents), but could also be about some part of myself that I’m parenting. One of the books I have suggests that penguins are also symbolic of growing dream awareness, because they move so well in the ocean/unconscious. In my dream, the penguin’s enthusiasm is an invitation to join him, which I don’t do, maybe because the whales (my calling) are still a bit off-shore and I’m just beginning to get glimpses of them so I’m not quite ready to plunge into the water. But I know, in the dream, that it’s okay that the penguin is happy there.
So my projection is that this dream invites me even deeper into the unconscious, into dreams, into nurturing (myself and my kids), and into emotion. For me, the dream evokes an invitation to pursue what’s really interesting.
