RPNR - Your dream suggests that you are exploring yourself by you own efforts. Your openness was something that enables you to receive from parts of you that would otherwise not respond, so you see the river. The river is the feelings that flow through you or we are immersed in; the process of life in our body, connecting with emotions, sexuality and changes of mood; the flow and events of our life or destiny.
But you set out to cross it to get to the other side, which means a great change reached by personal efforts - which you make. Crossing a river is often a representation of death - in your case the experience of facing death.
The process of our inner growth faces us with meeting death again and again. For each experience is a leaving behind old values and beliefs as the new life emerges. Here is a part of a mans description of his experience of death.
I know there is death
For I died
Under my father’s hands.
And death was the loss
Of everything,
My children –
My life,
My work,
My woman,
Gone – to be no more.
In his arms
My father carried the
Empty shell of me,
The corpse of what I had been.
And he lay it upon a
Heavenly meadow
Where dwelt
The potency of all things given.
All that, in my life,
I had given to others,
And all they had given to me,
Began entry into my dead form
To become its life.
I wonder was your uncle dead, or has he been a major influence in your life, for it was his influence that caught you and helped you through this experience? See
http://dreamhawk.com/approaches-to-being/questions-2/#SummingYou have the courage to journey on into the world within you. It is an excellent way to realise your real truths about your relationships and career goals.
Tony