What do your dreams ask of you?

We talk about dreams as if they belong to the night. As if they live only in sleep, in fragments that vanish when the morning light comes in. But dreams don’t end when we wake up.

In sleep, my dreams are like water, like the ocean at night. They pull me under, they blur shapes, they carry fragments from places I thought I had forgotten. They come in pieces, riddles, shadows. Sometimes they are terrifying, sometimes ecstatic, and often both at once. They demand something. They ask me to face them — even when they don’t make sense; even when it’s something I’d rather avoid.

I’ve been thinking about how our waking dreams aren’t so different. They’re also confusing. They also ask us to enter the dark, to risk drowning in doubt, in failure, in fear. To face messages we don’t always want to hear. And like dreams at night, they are not linear. They arrive in fragments, glimpses, intuitions. If we want our dreams to come true, we have to be willing to step into that dark water. To listen. To wrestle with uncertainty. To let the symbols guide us, even when we don’t fully understand them. To trust the invisible.

This photography felt like a dream. The image of water feels important. Water is both birth and death. It cleanses and it drowns. To enter water is to surrender control — you float, you sink, you resurface transformed. And, you know, dreams, too, pull us into depths where clarity disappears. And it can be terrifying. But perhaps we need that uncomfortable, terrifying surrender to emerge as our real self, the one who will make dreams come to life.

(And, yeah, obviously, I also thought about how art is not unlike dreams at all.  Both art and dreams resist certainty. They exist to open, to confuse, to question, to reveal truths.)

Maybe dreams are not messages to be solved like puzzles, nor predictions of the future, but invitations to step into the dark water, to trust that even if we don’t understand yet. Reminders that we are capable of entering the unknown. That we can stand in the darkness, let it swallow us for a while, and still resurface carrying what’s us.

And maybe our waking dreams — our goals — ask the same thing: to risk disorientation, to risk surrender, so that something new can take shape. What if the point is not to control our dreams, but to listen to what looks like the darkness within us, but feels as familiar and real as the pulse of the ocean?