Dreams again

I wrote the last post this morning about a dream I had last night. This post is about a dream I had the night before.

I don't typically dream that I'm floating anywhere (some people do, but in a more abstract way. My dreams tend to be very detailed and realistic.) Anyway, in this dream, I'm in the ocean. The water is very blue and clear and quiet. I'm probably about 15-20 feet down... deep enough that it's starting to get dark, but not so deep that I can't still see the sun rays refracting through the surface. I'm swimming around and I look to my left and I see my friend (whose name I will leave out for her sake) swimming next to me. I didn't notice at first, but come to realize that she is completely naked. (Think art, not eroticism, please.) She is completely genderless--her body is not male or female (though I keep using the female pronoun because, in real life, she's still a girl.) She has an intensely serious expression on her face and I get the idea that there's something I'm supposed to know, but I don't. I start to get really scared... not because I'm afraid of drowning, but because of the darkness that so closely surrounds me and that there's something I'm meant to know but I can't understand it. I feel afraid and also a bit like a failure for not knowing.

I told my friend (the one from this dream) about it and she gave a few possible meanings, but mostly she asked me what I felt. I told her that I mostly felt afraid and ashamed. Then she asked me what I looked like. To my surprise, I didn't know. I hadn't thought of it, but in my dream, I didn't have a gender either. But more than that, I didn't have a race, ethnicity, religion, height, weight, or maybe even a physical body. Mostly, I didn't have an identity. I was just an existence, swimming in this ocean near where the darkness begins, feeling afraid and ashamed of something I didn't know.