by Crystal Kernan

Created on: May 01, 2007   Last Updated: May 11, 2007

As a child I had a recurring nightmare. I usually do not talk about it, even today.

I was four, maybe five, alone in the middle of a large swimming pool, treading water. The sun beat down on my body, the trees swayed, it was quiet, there was nobody else around. At some point as I swam I sensed a shift, a vibration below me, a warm swirling sensation between my toes. I didn't like it, I knew that much. I was afraid. I didn't want to look down.

But of course I did.

At first it was black and that was all. But it was an endless black, too much for a four year old-maybe five-to understand, as my dream eyes struggled to adjust. The black had a hazy quality to it as well, like shadow, as it crept up from the bottom of the pool to cover the drain. And then at last I saw it: the blow hole. The lone eye.

The whale.

The sudden surge of panic usually woke me. It was a kind of panic I was accustomed to, actually, even at that age; the kind of panic that drove me from my bed at three a.m. every morning to march down the stairs to check the clock near the television set. What I was looking for, I cannot say. Maybe I was looking for something, maybe I was running from something. Maybe I wanted something for myself, for my brother, for my mother and father who rarely seemed to want much for me.

It was that kind of panic that also pushed me into closets several times a week, with that same brother and mother, away from my father. We knew how to hide when we had to, from him. Whales knew how to find me in my dreams and sometimes he knew how to find us in the house and those were frightening times, too.

* * *

I met a wonderful woman on the flight home from London this weekend. To go into vast description would be to do her a disservice, however, so I will not even try. Curiously, the subject of my strange dream came up. She happened to be a student of Jungian dream analysis and found the whole thing quite interesting.

"Jung believed that everyone has a shadow," she said, which was something I already knew.

"Isn't there a way we can be rid of it?" I asked. "The idea of carting a shadow around for the rest of my life is a bit exhausting. I want to be free."

"There is a way, yes."

"And so how," I said, not a question, for I thought I already knew the answer. I didn't want to hear it; I'd been avoiding the whale since I was four.

Maybe five.

"You have to look at the shadow-really study it. You might be afraid at first, because you don't really know what's in it, what it contains. But sit

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