Thread: humpback whales in a swimming pool

What do all people in your dream share in common? Do they, for example, go to the same chapel or do they all belong to the same church?

Although it would usually be best to have additional general background information about you as well as recent events just before the dream in order to provide an accurate interpretation, the very unusual presence of whales in the swimming pool shows that this dream comes from the deepest layers of your unconscious mind and points to an important issue that it would probably be best to look at.

To start off, being in the home where you lived from age 10-20 suggests that sometimes in your current life situation, there could be a tendency to react to events is some ways like a young girl or a teen for example.

Perhaps when certain stresses or opportunities etc. appear on the scene, there may be a leaning towards kind of pulling back and wanting to be “taken care of” instead of venturing forth.

This is probably partly symbolized by the fact that while living in that house, your mum and step dad were together and presumably “caring for you” as a united parental pair although perhaps there were already some upsetting signs of conflict and separation which would have created some sense of worry.

Water often represents the inner world of energy and interests/likes in its emotional aspect, sometimes including the idea of human interaction.

The form that the water takes is a clue about the nature of the feelings and relationships etc., e.g. is the water in a river that flows, or is it stagnant? Is it the ocean, a puddle, a lake or a stream?

A swimming pool suggests a kind of man-made order as opposed to a “natural” lake or pond and the presence of huge whales in your pool also could suggest that certain attitudes etc. have been built up over the years which may have the effect of constricting the potential for growth and development as symbolized by the whales and especially by their babies.

As already mentioned, the presence of whales in dreams is a significant image and it contains many aspects.

While fascinating and “something we want to take care of”, they are also potentially frightening (afraid to go into the pool with them), huge and instinctive, mirroring our own fears of powerful, unruly instincts in us and in the outer world which of course make it hard to work at our own self development as much as we could.

So they represent in summary the inchoate mass of instincts, feelings, thoughts, abilities, talents, genetic inheritance etc. etc. that make up a person and which, although containing many opposite and conflicting elements, must be united somehow into a cohesive “one” in order to provide a coherent sense of identity and therefore of reasonable contentment in the long run.

For example, people have noticed over the millennia that unlike themselves, whales’ eyes are basically on opposite sides of their heads. On analogy, they can see “two things at once”; that is, they can see “opposites” and unite them, unlike humans who can only see “one thing at a time”, and this concept is part of what whales symbolize in dreams.

The uniting of opposites provides a feeling of calm and contentment, so the dream could be trying to depict that there are deep reliable instinctive energies within that can protect you during life’s ongoing challenges in the years ahead if you can “keep in touch with them” by keeping them in the pool.

Children usually symbolize the growth of various aspects of the personality and in the case of a woman, a daughter consistently represents her potential overall unique development as an individual.

The dream apparently is showing that you shouldn’t be afraid to allow this part of you to experience and explore new things in life (daughter jumps into to the pool but the whales don’t bother her).

To allow this, certain boundaries and horizons need to be broadened (the pool needs enlarging to accommodate the baby whales) and the failure to do this could be devastating and sad (one baby whale dies and the adults leave, going back into your deep unconscious where their helpful side won’t be effective in everyday life).

The dream then shows the arrival of mostly male figures (two sets of male twins).

In mythology and symbolism, twins complement one another as two parts of the same whole, e.g. day and night, hot and cold, peace and war, above and below etc. etc., and this idea tends to underlie the appearance of twins in dreams.

As a more specific example, the mythological twins Castor and Pollux demonstrate the usual duality, e.g. one dark and the other light; one mortal, the other immortal; one creates while the other one destroys. Therefore, they can both be seen as participating in the “Wheel of Transformation”.

The latter can be viewed psychologically as the gradual process of maturing and becoming a unique individual over time.

The many contrary “opposites” in our nature, e.g. good and bad, mean and kind, hateful and loving, greedy and altruistic etc. etc., have to be honoured and accepted while being worked at by a conscious ego in order to kind of “join them together” in harmony which can be very hard to deal with.

For instance, we would prefer to always feel friendly towards others but we are sometimes shocked by certain cold feelings and judgments about people that seem to appear from nowhere.

The image of a boy in the dreams of a woman usually relates to such things, for example, as irrepressible interest and action, endeavour and assertiveness as opposed to, say, a certain inactivity.

Perhaps these aspects of yourself are too often in a kind of “party mood” (everyone arrives in swimming clothes) or much too unconscious (the one boy who has to be rescued from deep beneath the water).

A male in the dreams of a woman also usually represents such concepts as “mind”, focus, self assertion in the face of difficulties, the state of her ability for critical thinking, her susceptibility to “general opinions and beliefs” current in her circle and in society in general, and her potential for gaining personal meaning and spiritual insight over time.

So the dream could be saying that only through the ongoing exercise of such traits in yourself could the “pool be expanded” so that the “whales come back” and the other “baby whale” can grow consciously in your awareness.

Anyway as mentioned, without knowing anything much about you, this approach to your dream may not fit your personal circumstances very well, but I hope these ideas can be helpful in some way.

Please feel free to make any comments or to ask any questions you may wish to about this particular way of looking at your dream.

Athanor

Very successful interpretation. I enjoyed reading it

Wow! That interpretation has made so much sense to my life over the past ten years and how im feeling, thankyou so much for that!! Xx

There is something that I can see in your dream. You cared for the whale babies. This care is your care for your children as a mother. You expect mothers to be tender. It also seems that you very much care for your children to the extent that you do not want them to be harmed. In real life, you might be practising lots of "don't" instructions with your children for fear and love but in the depth of your heart, you know that they are trying to get their natural independence.

This is a critical stage in your life as you are seeing your children gradually getting independent and that they may one day leave you (as a fact of life). Two symbols in the dream strengthen this interpretation: the still water (fear) and the deep water (the unknown). You say in English "Still water runs deep". This reflects the dichotomy of your children's innocence vs. your experience as an adult. You also say that people whom you know gathered you on the pool. This further proves that you always want your children to keep away from strangers (as all mothers do).

Before you had the dream, have you had the problem with one of your children in their pursuit of independence?

I do tend to project my own fears onto them as a way of protecting them. We recently moved house and towns so I don't let them just play out by themselves like I would have in our old village, I make sure they are aware of the dangers of strangers and traffic as I am so frightened of something happening to them. also when they have been on holiday with family members i tell them they are not to go near the sea or on boats (as im not there to keep them safe).

Athanor:

I can feel the whales and the pool, but I can't connect what I feel with your description. This is irrelevant for franx, but for my benefit, can you explain the whales in a way that I am more likely to understand?

For me, the house that the pool is in is a mind, not just the conscious part, but the context that a person lives in. So for instance, if I want to connect with someone and know something of their experience, I visit their house. The water in the pool is the 'living water' that we find through religious experience or interaction with other people. Wanting more of that water accounts for all human desire, as I experience it.

The whale is like the white whale in Moby Dick, or the fish in the story of Jonah. Maybe it is sort of the subconscious side of one's personal self, and its "body" includes one's personal circumstances, in other words one's destiny. Its conscious and intelligent in the sense that one's subconscious self is conscious and intelligent, even though the conscious self is largely ignorant of it.

My first impression of the dream in this thread is that people's spiritual needs were not being met, perhaps as a result of overly focusing on outward values with insufficient appreciation of the deeper needs they are connected to. This is reflected in the whales wanting to leave, and not being able to care for the baby whales. It reflects a lack of time, energy, or spiritual food to keep that aspect of life alive. Not enough freedom to swim in 'living water'. So maybe I should say that the whale reflects what is known of that self through its mutually conscious interaction with the outward personal self. Presumably the deeper self doesn't actually die, but its ability to grow in its conscious interaction with the outward self suffers and partially dies for a time.

I ran out of time here, but my hope is to gain a better understanding and awareness of this 'whale' and of the 'water', both of which are ever-present but nevertheless confusing things for me.

Hi shadowofwind,

As a starting point, I would say that your comments should remind us overall of what C.G. Jung said about looking at dreams: “… we must handle dreams with nuance, like a work of art, not logically or rationally, as one may make a statement, but with a small restriction somewhere. It is the creative art of nature which makes the dream, so we must be up to it when we try to interpret them”.

And a dream forum, while of course valuable because most of us have no other access to learning about dreams, does have its limitations.

For me, I feel it’s important to keep things simple because most of the time, not much is known about the dreamer.

So it’s very understandable that my brief description wouldn’t connect very well with what you’re feeling about the image of the whales in the pool.

Lots of times, it’s even better to go with the feeling one gets and to forget about obtaining too much of an intellectual description of “what the image means”!

But since you asked, I’ll try to provide a few additional ideas about what the whales may signify.

For instance, you mentioned Moby Dick. Analyst Edward Edinger writes in “Melville’s’ Moby Dick”:

“What is the meaning of this mighty whale, the central character of the book? The problem is that the whale has too many meanings… The whale and its multitude of meanings becomes a Cretan labyrinth wherein one is almost sure to lose oneself…

The sea and the whale represent the primordial unconscious psyche which contains the aboriginal energies of life – numinous, awesome, terrible. The sea is the collective unconscious and the whales that inhabit it are its major contents, the archetypes. The green island surrounded by the sea is the ego, the structural order of consciousness.”

The idea is partly that while going through hard knocks and difficulties, an individual has to rend from the unconscious “whale” what he or she needs to survive, e.g. the “light of consciousness” as symbolized by whale oil which was used in lamps during the nineteenth century.

Moby Dick is “white”, that is, he is a sacred animal, something different from ordinary whales, in this case symbolizing the overall inherent potential for completeness and wholeness of the personality which must never be “destroyed” through an unfortunate ignorance or just plain self-destructiveness.

So this is perhaps another way of saying how you felt that the spiritual needs of people related to the dream were not being met.

Regarding Jonah, Dr. Jung writes:

“The golden haze of childhood memories arises not so much from the objective facts as from the admixture of magical images which are more intuited than actually conscious. The parable of Jonah who was swallowed by the whale reproduces the situation exactly. A person sinks into his childhood memories and vanishes from the existing world. He finds himself apparently in deepest darkness, but then has unexpected visions of a world beyond. The ‘mystery’ he beholds represents the stock of primordial images which everybody brings with him as his human birthright, the sum total of inborn forms peculiar to the instincts. I have called this ‘potential’ psyche the collective unconscious”.

After experiencing these powerful, healing collective images, the person can be “reborn” like Jonah who reappeared from the whale, bald like a baby.

To help explain more about whales as symbolizing archetypes, here are a few definitions regarding the meaning of “archetypes” as found in “Jung Lexicon” compiled by analyst Daryl Sharp:

“Archetype. Primordial, structural elements of the human psyche.

Archetypes are systems of readiness for action, and at the same time images and emotions. They are inherited with the brain structure - indeed they are its psychic aspect. They represent, on the one hand, a very strong instinctive conservatism, while on the other hand they are the most effective means conceivable of instinctive adaptation. They are thus, essentially, the chthonic portion of the psyche . . . that portion through which the psyche is attached to nature. ["Mind and Earth," CW 10, par. 53.]

It is not . . . a question of inherited ideas but of inherited possibilities of ideas. Nor are they individual acquisitions but, in the main, common to all, as can be seen from [their] universal occurrence. ["Concerning the Archetypes and the Anima Concept," CW 9i, par. 136.]

Archetypes are irrepresentable in themselves but their effects are discernible in archetypal images and motifs.

Archetypes . . . present themselves as ideas and images, like everything else that becomes a content of consciousness. [On the Nature of the Psyche," CW 8, par. 435.]

Archetypes are, by definition, factors and motifs that arrange the psychic elements into certain images, characterized as archetypal, but in such a way that they can be recognized only from the effects they produce.["A Psychological Approach to the Trinity," CW 11, par. 222, note 2.]

Jung also described archetypes as "instinctual images," the forms which the instincts assume. He illustrated this using the simile of the spectrum:

The dynamism of instinct is lodged as it were in the infra-red part of the spectrum, whereas the instinctual image lies in the ultra-violet part. . . . The realization and assimilation of instinct never take place at the red end, i.e., by absorption into the instinctual sphere, but only through integration of the image which signifies and at the same time evokes the instinct, although in a form quite different from the one we meet on the biological level. ["On the Nature of the Psyche," CW 8, par. 414.]

Psychologically . . . the archetype as an image of instinct is a spiritual goal toward which the whole nature of man strives; it is the sea to which all rivers wend their way, the prize which the hero wrests from the fight with the dragon. [Ibid., par. 415.]

Archetypes manifest both on a personal level, through complexes, and collectively, as characteristics of whole cultures. Jung believed it was the task of each age to understand anew their content and their effects.:

We can never legitimately cut loose from our archetypal foundations unless we are prepared to pay the price of a neurosis, any more than we can rid ourselves of our body and its organs without committing suicide. If we cannot deny the archetypes or otherwise neutralize them, we are confronted, at every new stage in the differentiation of consciousness to which civilization attains, with the task of finding a new interpretation appropriate to this stage, in order to connect the life of the past that still exists in us with the life of the present, which threatens to slip away from it.["The Psychology of the Child Archetype," CW 9i, par. 267.]”



As you touched on, the image of a house in dreams symbolizes the dreamer as a wider whole, including the ego, which changes according to current and unfolding circumstances.

Dr. Jung described his dream of a house as follows:

“I dreamt that I was in ‘my house,’ apparently on the first floor, in a cozy, pleasant drawing-room furnished in the style of the eighteenth century. I was rather astonished because I realized I had never seen this room before, and began to wonder what the ground floor was like. I went downstairs and found it rather dark, with panelled walls and heavy furniture dating from the sixteenth century or even earlier. I was greatly surprised and my curiosity increased, because it was all a very unexpected discovery. In order to become better acquainted with the whole structure of the house , I thought I would go down to the cellar. I found a door, with a flight of stone steps that led down to a large vaulted room. The floor consisted of large slabs of stone, and the walls struck me as very ancient. I examined the mortar and found it was mixed with splinters of brick. Obviously it was an old Roman wall. I began to grow excited. In a corner, I saw an iron ring in one of the stone slabs. I lifted it up and saw yet another narrow flight of steps leading down to a sort of cave which was obviously a prehistoric tomb. It contained two skulls, some bones, and broken shards of pottery. Then I woke up.

…The dream is in fact a short summary of my life— the life of my mind. I grew up in a house two hundred years old, our furniture consisted mostly of pieces about a hundred years old, and mentally my greatest adventure had been the study of Kant and Schopenhauer. The great news of the day was the work of Charles Darwin. Shortly before this I had been living in a still medieval world with my parents, where the world and man were still presided over by divine omnipotence and providence. This world had become antiquated and obsolete. My Christian faith had been relativized by my encounter with Eastern religions and Greek philosophy. It is for this reason that the ground floor was so still, dark, and obviously uninhabited.

…My intuition consisted in a sudden and most unexpected insight into the fact that my dream meant myself, my life and my world, my whole reality as against a theoretical structure erected by another, alien mind for reasons and purposes of its own.”

Regarding water, Dr. Jung says in the context of the disappearance of living symbols from most societies:

“That is why we have a psychology today, and why we speak of the unconscious. All this would be quite superfluous in an age or culture that possessed symbols. Symbols are spirit from above, and under those conditions the spirit is above too... Our unconscious, on the other hand, hides living water, spirit that has become nature”.

Anyway, I hope that these additional ideas will be helpful.

Here is another possibility...

PROBLEM of the PAST
At your old house where you lived from 10-20 was when your mum and stepdad were together, so maybe you were thinking of that in relation to you, and the fear or potential for a split up with your partner.
If you are already separated, perhaps it means some problems you had with your parents at that time, that now affect your kids, or one, or that you carry over that can.

BIG ISSUES
To me, whales represents a huge problem or something awesome that is good.
First one, then two. Could they represent your mum and stepdad?
But first there was one might mean you thinking of yourself, maybe being alone or separated, then another. Or maybe you, and then another in terms of who creates the potential problem. Could you fear what happened to your parents, splitting up? And that is why you fear going in, and fear your kids going in? In reality, it actually happened twice, first with your father.
Two again, like the whales.
And a humpback might represent a huge burdon, on the back.

You felt you were looking after whatever the whales mean, perhaps to keep this from happening, to nurture the adult couple you are part of or you children in this huge potential problem or fear facing them.
Or maybe you thought of your mum who was first, then your stepdad, or one of your children, then the other, concerning this.

AFFECTING YOUR KIDS, and YOUR REBIRTH
You have two children.
You felt anxious and frightened for your daughter, though this issue never bothered her. Maybe she is too young to be affected. Or she represents the new part of you that isn't.
Then came two new births of new or renewed ideas from one big one - two from one, as if the idea of a couple again from you. The old big one would not support these new ideas regarding your children being safe with this big problem.. Maybe there wasn't enough room for it, as long as the huge problem or fear was there. It was taking up most of your space. You got cramp!
And so the adults left. You pleaded for them to stay, thought to make more room, but that wasn't the answer.
So, you needed to rid the fear or cause for such concern, for the new to come in. Otherwise your ability to look after you and your partner will also go away, if I'm right, which was your fear. And you pleaded for that not to happen.

MAKING THE DISTANT RETURN
Twins, again, enter to try to make up for the twin loss. Distant relatives on the side that was not your father's - the problem area perhaps - and two more twins close to you, to make this situation friendly.
So these new ideas dove in and sat on the bottom, much deeper than normal.
Out of your depth, you panicked and asked for help from the part that was not affected, to save this situation.
But this attempt to save your new idea caused the original birth of the new, or renewal from the old, to die.
　
　
　
　
　
　
　
　
　

This is also a good interpretation!! My mum and stepdad split up when I was pregnant with my first child, I was still living at home, my mum moved out taking me with her (against my will), my twin sister stayed with my stepdad, I wanted to stay with him too but my mum took me away and made us both homeless for a couple of weeks when I was about 4 months pregnant. It was very emotional and draining, I know me and my daughters would have had a much better life then and now if I had stayed with my stepdad, I have always resented my mum for that.

Originally Posted by Athanor

Hi shadowofwind,

As a starting point, I would say that your comments should remind us overall of what C.G. Jung said about looking at dreams...

...

Anyway, I hope that these additional ideas will be helpful.

Thanks Athanor for taking the time to compose and type all that.

In my experience, in order to keep growing intellectually in this area, its necessary to stay with it by following up insights with more thinking. Learning is like harvesting, and if we don't plant part of the preceding harvest, the next season is barren. Like nearly everyone else, I often have trouble integrating this with the rest of my life responsibilities. I had to work much of this weekend, and don't think I can at this moment come back with some interesting thoughts here to show that I've made good use of what you said. But I read all of it, and thank you for putting it out there.