Diving in dreams

[SanderP]

Hi!

A few members took this up in another thread (this one). Like lungfish said, it would be interesting to know how many of us have similarities in our dreams.
So, do you/have you dream(ed) about diving or something related to diving?

As for me, I have dreamed several times that I can breathe water. It's usually the same dream all over: I go to my local pool and jump in, I'm descending like a stone and struggle becouse I can't hold my breath anymore. Then I take a big inhale and realize I can breathe underwater when I inhale and exhale really slowly. Quite crazy, I know.

Anyway, tell us about your experiences with dream-diving.

 

[AltSaint]

I do it all the time. Usually the water is crystal clear, and there are large colourful dinosaur-like creatures there ( but not agressive ). I often wake up holding my breath.

And no, I don't self-medicate just before bedtime....

 

[jome]

I often dream about diving, but usually I cannot remember the details. I did have a weird dream once, where I was "diving" in the air. I was hovering a few meters above ground, making swimming motions and gliding along around the house, holding my breath, of course. I swam out side and the fun part was "swimming" down hill. I would keep a few meters above the ground and gather momentum and speed and glide down the slope from our (childhood) home to the shore, where the lake is. Then it switched somehow and all of a sudden I was at a start of a competition. On the countdown I started packing. I soon woke up to loud laughter. My girlfriend had seen me start packing in my sleep and started laughing out loud. She thinks packing looks funny enough as it is, but apparantely unbearably so when done while sleeping

 

[d_deftone]

Dear AltSaint,

If you wake up holding your breath, please check with your doctor if you are suffering from sleep apnea (holding your breath for 40 sec or more during sleeping). It is very common, although not too dangerous it can be lethal and may also cause health-related problems in the future.

Just an advice thats all.

thanks,

 

[perow1]

I have had many dreams in wich i freedive/hold my breath. I also find out when dreaming thath i can breathe under water. One time I was in a dynamic no fins competitions and unfortunatly there was a bed in every 25m turn so my chenses was ruined until I found out i was able to breathe under water. I cannot tell you how it ended because I kept swimming until i woke up...
....pretty far i guess.

An interesting thing might be that I have learnt to recognize when i am dreaming this way. At once i start breathing under water i know I am a sleep...
....for a short while I am able to control my dreams and do amazing thingg, but I tend to wake up very fast when in this state. I guess some people refer to this as lucid dreaming, and there are actually people trying to learn to dream this way..
.....or so I have read.

 

[Spaniard]

I dreamt that I held my breath for over 10 mins, then a magician tried to beat it. I've asked AIDA to ratify it.

 

[naiad]

I dream about swimming and diving all the time, probably most nights. It is usually outdoors, in a very deep pool or crystal clear lake. Strangely, in dreams about diving I am almost always with normal clothes, and without mask or fins.

It is weird how realistic these dreams are. When I am diving without a mask, everything looks fuzzy, just as it would in real life. If the water is cold, it really feels cold. Recently I was dreaming about swimming in a lake, and the water splashed in my mouth, and I could taste the pondwater.

I often hold my breath when I dream about diving, and sometimes wake up still holding my breath. Normally it is only for a few seconds, but sometimes, I try to go for a max static. Once I was doing this and (I hope this was only a dream!) I had a samba. Recently I had a dream that I was trying to go for a 6:00 dry static. I tried twice, but only did about 1:00 each time because it became too difficult.

Lucia

 

[lungfish]

Hi All,
I started another thread before I realized this one was already going.... the water theme in dreaming is terribly interesting to me. I really enjoy reading these descriptions.

I recall using swimming in my flying dreams as a youngster and it still happens today...
I will go into this deeper as soon as I can figure out how to delete the other thread...
Lungfish

 

[BennyB]

Hmm.... right.

Ok, when I was under 10 or so, I used to have dreams very similar to Simo, where I was swimming around the house, kind of breast-stroking around the place. Only it was in air, not water. And when I was outside I could go higher, but the "danger" felt similar to going deeper in the ocean so I didn't want to go too high in case it all stopped and I fell.

Now, on to today. I do have dreams quite a bit that revolve around being underwater and breath holding. But I put this to you all...

Remember the games Doom and Tetris? Who has played these games until the wee hours of the morning and then gone to bed to experience the weirdest dreams? Mmm.

I imagine that most of the people on this site, like myself, eat, drink, sleep, daydream about freediving most of the time. It goes to reason that something that they think about all day translates itself into their dreams.

And if someone annoys you in your dreams, straife to the right, hit 3 for shotgun and blast em!!

 

[knoodelhed]

Very interesting. In one dream I was walking at night along a cliff near a hotel, and was drawn to an illumination out in the water. I made my way down to the edge of the sea, found that I had a pair of closed-heel stereos and some swimming goggles in my bag, disrobed, and entered the warm, surreally clear water. I curiously swam out to the phenomenon, took a breath, and descended. Mind you, in salt water, I float rather nicely just in trunks, so I knew straight off this was just a dream, so I kept breathing and looking around. The sea bottom was strewn with toppled brick walls and ionic column sections. The light became more intense, so I continued to penetrate the wreckage to find the source. Eventually I swam into a room containing a table, on which stood one of those analog wind-up clocks in a glass dome, its movement twisting away to and fro.

 

[dannybuoy]

Beautiful.

I dream about freediving so often i started dividing my dreams into different themes, and most of them correspond to dreams mentioned here. There are the dreams about floating/swimming around in air, through the house and town. They are sweet but the one thing i don't like is that when i wake up, i want to try it and it never works. Breathing underwater for me is usually through my mask, and i actually feel the rush of fresh air past my eyeballs as it flows to my nose. The ones about competitions are always very unusual competitions, like swimming underneath crowds, or in pools of very odd proportions, or jumping in, putting on equipment and then doing a dynamic. And the competitions are always in a foreign place, usually somewhere in Eastern Europe (i've never been to Eastern Europe). Some of my favorite dreams involve just walking around and the scenery slowly getting flooded and taking the dive from there; i jumped around the Atomium in Brussels with a bunch of other freedivers in one. And there are the dreams about freediving with animals, the otters who sat on my head and shoulders and the orca who invited me to tag along on his dorsal.

I think i hold my breath, too, judging from the lactaids i sometimes feel in my legs as i wake up, but i'm not worried about it, for i know i always enjoy training even more on days i've dreamt about freediving, no matter how good or bad i actually perform.

One thing i learned early on though: never dream about standing in warm, floating water.

 

[spaghetti]

If spearfishing dreams are on topic, this is mine (at least ten or twenty nights a month)
After dreams of some crooked adventures about women, I find myself walking along the shore in my hometown. Passig by hotel Riviera and heading to Moby Dick's Pizza, I focus that the water is bluer than ever, fluorescing and clear. I give a look and it's full of HUGE fishes (carps, groupers, barracudas, and others never seen before). They're hundreds, swimming slowly, inviting and harmless. A passer by shakes me: "Run home and get your speargun: can't you see it's full of fish?!".
In one nano-second I'm in the water with all of my gear, but fishes have vanished, the water has turned ill-green, but I don't give up. I know they're around. At last I found them, aim to the biggest and pull the trigger. As the shaft is running, I wake up kinda scared, in anguish.
Weird dream?

 

[lungfish]

Wow!
So many of you swim in your "flying dreams"! I thought it was just me.... lets explore this further. We may find some In-common Jungian archetypes, or something else....
lungfish

 

[cdavis]

Flying, dreaming, freediving, all very closely linked in my head. At age 3 and 4, vivid, intensely real dreams of flying around my bedroom, like Peter Pan (I'd never heard of Peter at the time). Made enough impression that I can still remember those dreams, exactly, and how pissed I was at my mother for suggesting they were just dreams. Years later I figured out that freediving is just like those dreams, only its the real thing. Don't dream much about diving that I remember, but hardly ever remember my dreams anyway.

Good thread

Connor

 

[crusty]

I often dream im a Dolphin and occasionally that im flying.

The Dolphin dreams are mostly chasing fish and Spearing them,( how i hold the speargun is a mistery) or just fee diving as a dolphin.
The best bit is not having to surface for air all the time

The flying ones are like Superman kind of stuff.

Most of my dreams involve one or more naked Females and Baby oil,
but hey im a Male

Crusty

 

[roy_nexus_6]

Once Chung-Tzu dreamed that he was a butterfly. It was such a vivd dream, that after he woke up, he no longer knew, if he was Chung-Tzu who dreamed of being a butterfly, or a butterfly who is dreaming that it is Chung-Tzu.

 

[tylerz]

If you wake up holding your breath, please check with your doctor if you are suffering from sleep apnea (holding your breath for 40 sec or more during sleeping).

Good reminder, however for those holding their breath due to a specific dream, there is no suggestion of a likely relation to problematic sleep anpea. Dreams sometimes trigger our body to respond in line with our dreams, but it is rare that the dream will keep repeating or last for long, which means the the body response as well will not be repeating. Therefore an instance of one holding their breath as a response to a dream does not hold the same clinical significance. It is more related to sleep walking, talking, twitching, etc, and would not be classified as a brain irregularity. More important than identifying you held your breath once in response to a dream, would be whether you are regularly lethargic and tired in a significant number of your days.

"Note that for any type of apnoea to even be considered of importance it must be at least 10 seconds in duration or longer. Specialists usually consider 5 or more of such apnoeas per hour to be of possible clinical significance (less than 5 per hour is normal)."

" * The most common type of sleep apnea is obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), caused by relaxation of soft tissue in the back of the throat that blocks the passage of air.
* Central sleep apnea (CSA) is caused by irregularities in the brain’s normal signals to breathe."

 

[tylerz]

Remember the games Doom and Tetris? Who has played these games until the wee hours of the morning and then gone to bed to experience the weirdest dreams?

Hahah... "I". Actually, I woke up this morning telling friends how I had a horrible sleep where I was half in sleep half out dreaming that I had to finish a mathematical problem to maintain a state of sleep. I wasn't solving it, therefore not sleeping, therefore trying harder to solve it, which only further exhausted me. This continued for hours. The previous night had ended with me giving up on a mathematical problem I was trying to solve for my work.

It goes to reason that something that they think about all day translates itself into their dreams.

Exactly. It happens to me all the time. Last night as well I was dreaming I was surfacing and ran out of air so I cautiously attempted to breathe and I could. Made the rest of the surfacing quite easy. I regularly have this happen in my various diving dreams. Usually I am diving already before I realize I can breathe underwater; realized usually after I feel a strong urge to breathe and try. I bet, 9 times out of 10 I am holding my breath at the same time in response to the dream and that moment where I can breathe underwater is the moment when I begin breathing in actuality (if there is such a thing) again.

Cheers,

Tyler

 

[knoodelhed]

Wow!
So many of you swim in your "flying dreams"! I thought it was just me.... lets explore this further. We may find some In-common Jungian archetypes, or something else....
lungfish

FWIW: In The Silent World, JYC cited having Superman dreams, or at least dreams of flying over a cityscape.

 

[naiad]

I almost forgot to mention my funniest diving dream, and maybe the funniest dream I've had...

It was the night after a diving session, so I must have been hungry as well as having apnea on my mind.

I was swimming in a pool of beef stew, and also eating it, carping my surroundings like a fish.