You know, for years, I just thought the ocean in my dreams was cool set dressing. Like a nice background for whatever crazy stuff my head was cooking up. But trust me, it’s not. It’s the whole damn stage, and I only figured this out after a total dumpster fire of a year where I nearly lost everything.
I started noticing the pattern right after the whole crypto farming disaster. I’d sunk all my spare cash, and honestly, some cash I shouldn’t have touched, into a project that went belly-up faster than a dead fish. The stress was through the roof. I was sleeping maybe four hours a night, and when I did, I was drowning.
Before that final, catastrophic week where I had to liquidate everything and wave goodbye to a huge chunk of my retirement, I remembered having the same dream over and over. It wasn’t about the charts or the servers. It was just water. A massive, terrifying, black ocean that felt bottomless. The surface was totally still, but I knew, deep down, that a hurricane was churning underneath. I didn’t get it then. I was too busy staring at my phone and watching the numbers drop.
After the crash, I hit the wall. I felt like a shell. My wife, bless her heart, told me to stop looking at the news and start looking at my head. That’s when I dragged out the three dusty notebooks I used to jot down dreams in, purely for kicks. I had been doing it for years, but never seriously analyzing the stuff.
I decided to treat it like a forensic investigation. I opened up those old books and flipped through every single entry that mentioned water, sea, ocean, or waves. I pulled out the timestamps—the dates of the dream—and then mapped them against my real-life timeline. I’m talking about big stuff: starting the business, leaving the old job, that nasty argument with my brother, and yes, the crypto mess.
I categorized the ocean appearances, and this is where the hidden truth just smacked me in the face:
- Tranquil, Vast Ocean: This always preceded a huge life shift that required me to be calm, even if I was moving house or changing career fields. It was like my subconscious was saying, “The foundation is solid, big boy. You got this.”
- Stormy, Choppy Water (Near Shore): This showed up right before a major argument or a disagreement that blew up in my face. It was telling me I was emotionally agitated and about to cause friction.
- The Deep, Still, Black Ocean: That frigid, bottomless nightmare? That one turned out to be the real killer. It only appeared right before the financial losses. It wasn’t about the event; it was about my emotional capacity being drained, empty, and unprepared for the scale of the risk I was taking. The emptiness was me, not the world.
- Surfing or Floating Easily: Surprisingly, this always matched the periods when I felt the most creative flow, when money was coming in easy, and I didn’t have to push too hard.
I realized that the ocean wasn’t just a symbol of emotion; it was the measure of my entire unconscious world. It’s the size, depth, and temperature of my own inner life. If the ocean was rough, my capacity for handling external stress was shot. If it was frozen, I was running on empty, spiritually and financially.
This whole mess, the reason I even started sharing this stuff, stems from that financial burnout. My old employer, a huge firm I’d been with for ten years, had given me some time off to deal with the loss, promising to keep my spot open. So I went quiet, I studied my dreams, I rebuilt my headspace. Two months later, I called them up, ready to get back to work with my new insights, feeling better than ever.
Turns out, they had already replaced me. Just like that. No call, no email. They even tried to say I technically resigned because I wasn’t answering their calls during my ‘break’ (I was literally instructed not to use my work phone). I was completely blindsided, left high and dry with zero income and a massive debt pile.
I started blogging just to process the anger and the disappointment. It was a way to organize my thoughts about failure and what my dreams knew that I didn’t. That old job, by the way, the one they said was so crucial? They have been trying to fill it ever since. They’ve cycled through three people in a year and the listing is still up, paying almost double what I was making. They thought they could find an easy replacement, but they couldn’t find someone who got the systems the way I did.
I look back now and I thank that black ocean dream. It warned me about my own internal state, telling me I was too cold and empty to handle the risk. Losing the farm was awful, but losing the job pushed me to turn this dream journaling from a weird hobby into a full-blown practice. The hidden truth is simple: your dream ocean is important because it’s the size of your soul’s savings account. You can’t make big withdrawals if the tide is out. Now I pay attention. Every single night.
