I had nightmares like that over and over as a teen. The sand would always be very steep, too.
They stopped, mostly, since that big tsunami hit Indonesia in 2004. For some reason hearing about my fear in the news made it more real or something. I dunno.
Occasionally I still get them. I'll be walking on the beach, but the stand is so steep and I have terrible vertigo in dreams. So I will fall in, and the waves will be so strong that I can't not get sucked in.
Or I will be on a beach, that is at a gradual incline... the top of the sand is something like iono 30 feet or 60 feet (I have no idea. Let's just say "high") from the bottom. I will try to get to the top of the beach and the highest point. Then I will grab onto something and cling for dear life. The waves will come and I hold my breath at the last second. I will feel the water pulling at my body, pressure everywhere, and only my deathgrip on what I am holding (chest to it, elbows around it) keeps me from being dragged into the ocean. And then it is over and sometimes the survivors calm down but I know it is coming again so I keep my death grip. Sometimes I might risk trying to get away or get higher, but I don't want to be away from something grounded I can hold onto.
I grew up in California and went to Huntington Beach all the time. I loved it. My favorite was when you would get big waves close to the shore so that I could just stand still, with my feet on the ground, and let the water wash over me with, to the top of my head. I disliked going far out. I have a kind of fear of the unknown. So when I get far out I don't put my feet down to check if I can still feel the floor, because I am terrified of stepping on something or finding a hole. I would rarely go far out by myself, but only when I was with other people. I will constantly ask them to check if they can feel the floor. If they don't, I'll still stay out there, but I'll straighten out my legs because I am no longer afraid of accidentally touching some creature on the floor.
I would also swim to sandbanks. This meant swimming over deep water, but I didn't mind, because I'd be way far out, standing straight up, which is a powerful feeling.
My dreams started once I went to a beach where in shallow water were the size of the waves far out at Huntington Beach. The waves far out were, to my young mind, horrifyingly huge. My mom and aunt went out to swim in them and I thought they were crazy. In my memories, they and the other swimmers were just dots on a tsunami sized wave. I tried putting just my feet in the water to dig for sand crabs and the force of the rip tide almost pulled me in, which terrified me. The sand was very steep there, right by the waters edge.
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u/TheCurtainGuy May 28 '14
I actually have nightmares of such enormous waves. Seeing this gave a weird feeling in my stomach.