Dreaming About Flooding

 This picture is from Elbow Falls in the Elbow Falls Recreation Area in Alberta Canada.  Elbow Falls was significantly changed by the flood of 2013.

Through the last several months as covid numbers have risen in Alberta, I have been dreaming about floods.  Floods that wash out a bridge.  Floods that was out chunks of a highway.  Floods that run across fields and then fill the ditches so that the water is creeping up on the road.  One might think that I was dreaming of floods because it was something I had recently been through.  No.  We have had one of the driest summers in a long while.  

I knew some of the dreams were important because I could remember them so vividly!  I felt that there was something that I was supposed to learn from the dreams.  Water, I know, represents emotion.  However, there was nothing going on in my life that would warrant that kind of emotion.  So I looked up what floods mean in a wonderful book - Letters From Home; A Guide to Symbols Awake or Dreaming by Patricia Troyer.  

The highlight of the many aspects of flooding was that floods show the destruction of the status quo and the wiping away to create something new.  Of course, this is done with a lot of damage that needs to be cleaned up and cleaning up is messy.  For me, I was seeing the resetting of our society world wide as a consequence of covid.  The emotions around decisions to mask or not, to vaccinate or not, to close or not, have permeated our culture.  There is an ongoing “flooding of emotions” that hits all of us.

One of the strangest dreams about flooding that I had was about me riding my horse (who is long gone) along the road near our farm that I grew up on (also long gone).  As I was riding, the water seemed to rise up out of the ditches on either side to slowly cross the road.  I remember saying, “Well there is another way of life gone”.  The floods have eroded the peace and the trust that we all had with each other and particularly in families where some are vaccinated and some are not.  It is a flooding of emotions that will take years to resolve.

Blessings.