I had this dream last night about something that happened when I was a kid. Funny, because I hadn't thought about it in a long time.
Everyone who has spent a lot of time around oceans has the one memory of the wave that almost got you. I remember mine. I was at White Sands Beach in Kona near my grandparents' house. White Sands beach was actually called Magic Sands Beach (though we never called it that for whatever reason) because half the time it was blanketed in fine white sand that covered your body like powdered sugar, and then the tide would change and their would be no sand at all. Just lava rocks. I don't remember if there was sand on the shore that day or not.
There were big waves at White Sands Beach. It was where the surfers hung out. My dad and my sister and I had swam out past where the waves break and were floating over soft rolls. And then the big wave came. We saw it coming far enough out to talk about it and it seemed like it took a long time to get to us. We were pretty sure it was going to break early though. Right on top of us.
I've never been really comfortable in the water. When I was a kid and people would ask me if I knew how to swim, I would tell, "Yes, but only in the shallow end." I took swimming lessons pretty much every summer as a child and I was deathly afraid of that diving board.
I don't know how old I was that day in the water but in my memory I'm very small and the wave is impossibly big, curling right over the top of us, blocking out the sun. I would guess I was somewhere around 8, which would make my sister about 16. Dad was floating between us and I was holding his hand. He said we were going to dive right through the bottom part of the wave and that I was to hold onto his hand and keep swimming until couldn't hold my breath any more. And I was not supposed to let go of his hand. The wave came. It was going to crash right on top of us. We dove...and I lost his hand.
In the dream we were in my old house on East Third Street, my mom, my dad, my sister, and I and there was a tsunami coming. We were in the hallway of the old part of the house and we heard it coming and we didn't know what to do or where to go. Water ripped through the hallway and pushed us all apart and I lost his hand and it was that same moment. That feeling of being ripped and pushed apart like a rag doll in the torrid water. Of surprising darkness. Of blind panic. I woke up in a cold sweat gasping for breath.
In real life, somewhere back there in the sea of my memory, I popped out of the water and Dad and Kelly where within a stone's throw of me. We regrouped and swam into shore, which was the one of the hardest journeys I ever had to make, through water anyway.
All in all, it probably wasn't really that big of a deal. The wave wasn't as big as I recall it to be and the situation not so dramatic. I asked my sister about it once and she couldn't really remember it, or at least not so vividly as I can. Funny that's it's come back to haunt me now.