SalmonSpirit - My dear, I have watched the river of dreams for what is a lifetime to most people. And your dream is special and tells me that you are a lovely young woman with a gift. I will try to explain.
First you tell us you suffer severe anxiety, yet in the dream you cut through all hundreds of images that usually really terrify and haunt people like fear of drowning and dying when they dream of going deep in the sea; like the monsters you hold in memory like the largest species of octopus, as well as huge crabs, lobsters, six-gill sharks and sturgeon that could be 40 feet in length. Nearly every person whose dreams I meet cannot pass through those images and take sometimes years to meet and pass through them. This tells me that the gift you have is largely unknown, unconscious, and is emerging in this wonderful dream. It is the gift if seeing all the awful beliefs and images our or your culture puts in front of you and you see you are in truth a much bigger person who emerges unscathed from things that cripple others for a lifetime.
But of course you are still a young woman who is 'small' and anxious and so you are in need of realising your immensity. To do this I need to tell you things that perhaps you have never realised before, so please take time to read and digest what is said in the links and what follows.
Whenever we dream its images are not like real life, because a dream is nothing like outer life where things could hurt you, but is an image like on a cinema screen that even if a gun is pointed at you and fired it can do no damage – except if you run in fear. So all the things that scare you are simply your own fears projected onto the screen of your sleeping mind. You cut through this because in some way you have learned or were born with the unconscious wonderful wisdom that you have that nothing can actually hurt you in you inner life, the life of your mind, imagination and beliefs. You cannot drown, or be shot or die in this world, so such fears that cause you anxiety are like images on a cinema screen.
Of course there are real threats in the outer world that can hurt you, but whatever threatens you in the world around you should never crush the wonderful spirit you have within you. See
http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/how-magical-we-are-how-lost-we-are/ -
http://dreamhawk.com/inner-life/water-wonderland/Remember also that you, the personality or name you call yourself, is a new thing and all you are now is recorded in a new brain. But where and why did that brain develop? Well, a simple answer is that it was caused by a seed from a seed and from thousands of seeds that began an unimaginable time ago in the ocean - in the slime where single celled life forms began. And that is where your present life began, in the slime of your parents mating. You are an example or ‘life’ the most mysterious thing, yet most of us are totally unaware of what causes us. You cannot say that your mother and father caused you, because you mother was a fertile place in which your father place a seed. Then her body was taken over by the process of life, and she was not the one to cause the growth of your body. The egg your father planted was also not created by him.
So you are really a very ancient being, a life form which has attained a small measure of self consciousness. Unfortunately most of us were taught to turn that self awareness outward. But fortunately you have realised in some way that you have an immense and deep inner world.
You can, if you wish, explore that wondrous world. There are tools or methods to aid you to do it, because your dream is only like a cover of a book, or computer icons on the monitor; they are lifeless unless you click on them.
So please see
http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/acting-on-your-dream/#BeingPerson -
http://dreamhawk.com/interesting-people/edgar-cayce-and-the-cosmic-mind-superminds/ as an example of the depths within you -
http://dreamhawk.com/approaches-to-being/lifes-little-secrets/ -
http://dreamhawk.com/inner-life/meetings-with-the-christ/So let's look at your dream, remembering that its images are simple covers on a massive book of wonders. Well you are standing on a float on the ocean. The float represents your awareness you gain through your senses - which makes you virtually blind and deaf. It shows you that your present awareness of you, your personality is only a small floating thing on the huge ocean of Life - and Life is not an inanimate or mechanical thing.
Then an urge from the huge self - your intuition - makes you take the dive to discovery. See
http://dreamhawk.com/inner-life/using-your-intuition-1/Amazingly you explore deeper and deeper into your usually unconscious self - which says to me that you have been there before in other 'seeds' experience. You go deeper and deeper and get to the slime at the beginning of life forms - and pass through - another wonderful achievement. You get to your core self. See
http://dreamhawk.com/dream-dictionary/core/ http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/levels-of-awareness-in-waking-and-dreaming/But there you encounter the huge being that you are at your core. I know we are raised to believe we are nothing but tiny ants that are helpless. It is huge lies told by poor little minds that have never had the courage to actually explore their own consciousness, but spout thousands of words - words that are actually associations they learnt and such words are never an expression of the reality that words express.
You are touching the reality that you are - and in doing so are shown how little and powerless are the things that you use to cause anxiety.
There is much more I could say - but it is enough. It is up to you to see if you can use any of it.
Meanwhile I send a grandfather's love and care - supposing that your grandfather had any love to give.
Tony