A – The second dream seems to me to be a clear communication with your brother.
The reason I say that is because our universe is basically a huge consciousness or as I have sometimes called it, sentience. But is has two other building blocks, wisdom and love or bliss.
Because it is difficult to have a clear picture of that, in dreams we often show it as a huge ocean – as your dream. But often we are so focussed on the needs of the physical world, when we are in the inner world/dimension of dreams, we feel all the fears and anxiety usual in our waking life.
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. So you cannot be hurt in your dreams. You cannot drown, you can’t die in a dream, no tiger or other animal can harm you. Of course you can feel feelings of dying, or being hurt, or drowning, but they are all images you create because you feel afraid and you haven’t faced up to your fears.
So your brother was trying to take you into the dimension of dreams – going under the surface – your waking fearful and often stressed or painful self. You didn’t need to hold your breath in dreams, but your fear led you to do so which made you wake up crying and feeling you couldn’t breathe, which was true. Fear does awful things to us.
So to be ready to follow your brother in the world he exists in totally at the moment – the inner dream world and its amazing dimensions – get the feeling you had in the dream of going under the surface but continue to breathe.
Of course you are having masses of dreams because your brother broke you through the curtain between the physical consciousness most people live in, the inner dimension that is foreign to most people. So you are catching up on your inner housework of integrating your past experiences. See
http://dreamhawk.com/inner-life/inner-world/#MakesInner Good luck on your inner adventures.
Tony