Writ in water
Methoughts I saw a thousand fearful wracks,
A thousand men that fishes gnawed upon...--Clarence, in Richard III
The other night I had an intense dream. I know, I know, there's nothing more sarcastic-quotes "fascinating" than other people's dreams. But this one was upsetting even for me. I was swimming in the Quabbin Reservoir or one of the rivers that feeds it, swimming above and into a partly-submerged building. It was old and huge, wooden post-and-beam construction, and full of disused machinery. The whole structure was part of a giant dam that had been broken, and flooded over, and then submerged when they built a modern dam somewhere downstream. I swam into chambers and up hallways full of clear water with weeds growing on all the structures and terrifying things on the bottom. Once I borrowed somebody's goggles and looked around underwater with full vision instead of the limited fuzzy vision my naked eyes have underwater. There was a giant eel underneath me, just about as long as I was, sleek and powerful with dark blue and brick red skin, and an underbiting jaw. Fortunately, it didn't look up and see me; it just flicked its tail and swam away. After that, I ripped off the goggles and threw them away. I had to be there and swim through the building anyway, and if I was just above a creature that would eat me, I'd rather not have to see it and scream my head off in advance.
There were other women swimming with me or standing above or under the water. One was my mother, and at least one was a drowned body who waved to me and grinned from the bottom of the building. There was a cute young girl with black hair worn in bangs, who I seem to know from real life and my own childhood. Maybe others I haven't met yet. The alarm went off and chopped into my dream, and even as I woke up I thought that the building had been my own head, my own self. Isn't it a truism that any building you enter in a dream represents your own mind? I don't know if I learned that first, and my later dreams have conformed because I think it's true, or whether I applied that factoid to my earlier dreams and went, "Aha!" In any case, I woke up with my stomach churning. Everything in the dream had been about fear and anxiety, about having to keep going no matter that things from the depths were coming to get me. I had to get up early for an interview, but I wanted with all my heart to roll over and go back to sleep and let the memory of that dream ebb away. ("Ebb". Sorry, I don't seem able to avoid water words.)
I just wrote a poem addressed to sovay declaring that When We Are In Power and divide the world between us, she should take the seas while I take all the fresh water. The dream the other night was as though the gods had taken me literally and said, "OK, these waters are you, get on with it." In real life, I love to swim, but at the same time I'm deathly afraid of certain things you encounter underwater. The James Tiptree, Jr. short story "Beyond the Dead Reef" rang a bell with me, but my fears are much more organic. Waterweeds--pondweed, anything green and squishy and formless that can look like hands reaching out for you or rotted bodies or sleeping predators. One of my teachers' glib definition of the abject was "Something that makes you go AAAAAaaAAAAA!" I experience abjection around underwater weeds. The more gloppy and chthonic they are, the worse I get. It's partly a reasonable fear--I don't want to swim onto a predator or discover a drowned corpse by stepping on it. But how often do those things happen, on average? Not very.
To top it off, I did once find the body of a man who had killed himself, when I was about fourteen. It was on dry land (the poor guy had hung himself in a backyard across the block from my house). Certainly, it was scary and sad. It has stuck with me in some ways--to this day, I hate floppy Halloween scarecrows because he looked like one himself. But there was nothing creepy about it. I was sorry that he was dead, to be sure, but I didn't take it personally. He hadn't become any sort of hideous gross thing that was COMING TO GET ME OMG. He was no threat at all. He was just dead, a sad sight. Everyone made a fuss--the police gave me the phone number of a therapist. "Oh you poor thing!" gushed one of our family friends. "They say children never get over things like that!" She was an idiot, of course, but I think everybody expected me to be haunted and crushed and have nightmares. I don't think I ever did. It wasn't all that important to me once it was over. Until just now, when I reminded myself of it in the last paragraph, I hadn't thought of that man for some months. Anyhow, my point being: my terror of squishy things underwater is massive and inexplicable even to me. Whatever fear I felt of that poor dead man in real life is tiny in comparison.
So it's a fear that is also irrational and inexplicable and deep, and it fascinates me at the same time it terrifies. I can't look away. I have the compulsion to see forms and faces in underwater weeds and leaf muck. Now, on dry land none of this would happen. I'd never even think of being scared of dry leaves on the forest floor or imagining that tree limbs waving in the breeze are dead hands reaching for me. But let it be a frond of weed waving in a current underwater, let it be reaching up for me from below in the dark, and I am gone--erupting out of the water with a shriek.
Once I had a dream about visiting a flooded YMCA (flooded buildings feature in a lot of my dreams). The swimming pool was in the basement, and it had risen up from an underground spring to fill the entire basement level. And you can't keep the water chlorinated in a pool fed from a supernatural underground spring, so it was getting green and full of algae. It was deserted. I went down alone. The place was luminous, with white walls. I looked into the basement, and saw the giant body of a green woman in the water, sleeping, lying on her side. She was made of green waterweeds, a great solid mass. Her back was to me, but I could tell she was a woman because her hip was hunched up and she had smooth rounded arms and what might have been hair. It was like looking at an underwater mountain range, one of those lines of mountains that suggests a huge sleeping human--but she really was a huge sleeping... woman? Person? Being? Her waterweeds were shaggy enough that I couldn't tell if she was clothed or naked. She would have been about two stories high if she had been standing up, but at the moment she was lying down under the water, asleep.
Perhaps she was a creature that could do nothing but sleep. Maybe someone had enchanted her there. Perhaps she was sleeping till she was needed and people called for her, like King Arthur. Certainly, she provoked me to admiration and terror. I was awed, but also thought: "What if she wakes up and turns to face me?" It might have killed me. At the same time, I loved her and wanted to know what had put her there, and what she meant to do when she woke. I have no idea whether she was a post-human, who came down the same stairs once and was forced to stay in the water, or an inhuman being from the depths who had risen to near the surface and assumed a form that humans would understand. In any case, she fascinated me, and I have thought of that dream often. That's the beautiful side, and my dream the other night was the ugly side, of my Thing About Waterweeds.