Jeanne C. Finley

Since childhood, my dreaming life has been plagued by tidal-wave nightmares.  Each nightmare is different in the specifics, but the same in its inescapable, violent destruction.  I’m treading water, or planted firmly on the shore, when a sound, or flicker in my peripheral vision, causes me to look over my shoulder and out to sea where a wall of water is rising to unimaginable heights and unspeakable dread.  I am forced to decide whether to swim out and meet the crest before it breaks, or try to outrun the monster.  Yet I know from the pit in my stomach and the panic in my heart that either direction is folly.  Still I must choose to act despite the overwhelming reality that the breaker is bound to consume me.  When it finally crashes over me I am overcome with terror.  Yet there is also a flicker of relief that the hopeless choice and anticipation is over.  Most likely this dreaming image is conceived from the summers I spent in the unpredictable Pacific Ocean surf and the two times that only luck saved me when I found myself facing a sneaker wave several times the height of the average wave of the day.  I have spent endless hours over the years searching for an image of a real tidal-wave to compare to my nightmare, but for reasons clear to any ocean swimmer, no one from the position of my dreams has documented the moment.  After the recent tsunamis in Sumatra and Japan I scoured the internet for a representation of my dreams.  What I found were images of the inexorable surge flattening everything in its path, including the population’s futile attempt to outrun the water bearing down on them.  The tsunami in Japan was the most documented tsunami in history and the images were far more horrible than anything I had imagined.  I became paralyzed in the effort to reconcile my dreams with the tragedy that was unfolding, and like so many others, the powerlessness to avert the tragedy or significantly assist those suffering in its aftermath, left me dazed as I tried to comprehend even the smallest thing about it.  Then, weeks after the Japanese tsunami hit, I found this picture in a news blog that claimed to contain documentary photographs as the tsunami struck the shore.  At last, from this image that so closely matched the tidal-waves of my nightmares, a sense of relief replaced my helplessness.  At last I understood something about what had happened.  At last I could share a moment of empathy with the victims of this catastrophe.  But my husband, the journalist, the “quibbler” as he is known, scoffed at me.  It’s fakery was so blatant.  And the cars driving on the wrong side of the road was just one of a dozen giveaways.  Of course a part of me had known that it was a fake but I had wanted to believe in its authenticity.  And that belief, although fleeting, opened up a pathway.  The image of my tidal-wave dreams, and the documentary images from the victims of this tsunami no longer needed to neatly match up for me to have some understanding.  It is in their confluence that some mysterious sense can be made.  The mix of nightmares with the reality of documentation remains haunting, and I believe in its creative power.  It is a power to bring empathy into the unknown because the nightmare informs the concrete.  It fuels the imagination.  Without the dream, the document is lifeless.  I am fortunate to be able to say that for the time being, my reality is secure and safe… so unlike the world of those who faced the actual tsunami, where the reality is not a dream at all.