For several seconds I remained suspended between states, unsure which reality carried more authority. The fear lingered in my body even as my cognitive mind began its familiar work of correction: I am home. I am safe. He is not in danger. Yet the reassurance arrived too late to fully dislodge the sensation. Stress, I am learning, does not reside primarily in thought. It inhabits muscle, breath, and reflex. I turned toward Cricket, asleep beside me, and rested my hand on her back. She responded with a small, involuntary sound. It was not affection exactly, but acknowledgment. It was enough. My breathing slowed. The current loosened its grip. I slept again.
When I returned to the dream later, in writing, I noticed that it resisted interpretation in the traditional sense. It did not behave like a message encoded in symbols waiting to be decoded. Instead, it presented itself as a mode of consciousness, a particular way my mind had organized experience under pressure. Dreams, in this light, are not stories the psyche tells itself so much as states the psyche enters. They are consciousness stripped of its executive oversight, perception ungoverned by the rules of waking coherence. The dream did not explain my stress; it enacted it.
This is where Monet’s Flood Waters becomes more than an illustrative parallel. Like the dream, the painting does not narrate an event; it renders a condition. The flood has already happened. The viewer arrives after causality has given way to consequence. Trees stand where they always have, yet their relationship to the land has been fundamentally altered. Their reflections blur into their bodies, and the ground itself refuses to assert clear boundaries. Orientation becomes provisional. One must look slowly, attentively, without the expectation of resolution.
In cognitive terms, dreams may be understood as consciousness operating without its usual metacognitive scaffolding. During waking life, I monitor, evaluate, and contextualize my experience continuously. I know what matters, what can wait, what belongs to the past. In the dream, that hierarchy collapses. Emotional salience replaces logical priority. My brother matters. Water moves. Action follows immediately from affect. This is not irrationality so much as pre-rational coherence. It is the mind organized around survival, attachment, and urgency rather than explanation.
Several waking threads converge here. Conversations with a friend in the Northwest about the atmospheric river flooding his region. The anticipation of traveling with my brother to his graduation at Northwest Missouri State, an event weighted with pride, logistics, and the subtle pressure of showing up fully. And beneath all of it, the sustained stress of my grandmother’s death and the responsibilities that followed: grief braided tightly with duty, memory entangled with administration. None of these experiences are catastrophic in isolation. Together, they saturate consciousness.
The dream absorbs these impressions and renders them as water. Renders them as a force without malice, as movement without intention. That quality matters. The river is not an antagonist. It does not pursue or punish. It simply pulls. This distinguishes stress from fear. Fear has an object. Stress has a condition. The dream, like Monet’s painting, captures that distinction with precision.
What becomes especially important, then, is the act of reflection itself. Writing the dream is not merely a record; it is a shift in consciousness. In psychological terms, this is metacognition. It is the mind observing its own processes. By returning to the dream deliberately, I reintroduce the executive functions absent during sleep. I name, contextualize, and relate. I do not explain the dream away, but I situate it. In doing so, I regain a form of agency not by controlling the current, but by understanding how I am being carried by it.
This reflective act mirrors the viewer’s position before Flood Waters. Monet does not resolve the flood, but he frames it. He slows perception. He invites sustained attention. Likewise, journaling allows me to hold the dream at a distance sufficient for insight without demanding mastery. The dream becomes neither prophecy nor pathology, but data: subjective, affective, and meaningful precisely because it resists simplification.
What remains most grounding is still the waking moment: the tactile certainty of fur beneath my hand, the soft sound of a living body responding. That moment represents a return not just to wakefulness, but to regulated consciousness. If the dream is immersion, reflection is shoreline. Not a denial of depth, but a place to stand.
In this way, the dream does not require belief in any grand theory of dream symbolism to matter. Its value lies in how it reveals the shape of my current consciousness. In what surfaces when control relaxes and impressions reorganize themselves freely. Like Monet’s flooded landscape, it shows me not what has happened, but how I am inhabiting what has happened. Writing it down does not still the water or slow the current, but it allows me to see where I am standing within it and maybe where it might be pulling me.