The Three Pools: A Dream, a Psyche, a Therapy Philosophy

Therapists have long been interested in the domain of dreaming and as a spiritually curious and neurodivergent therapist, I am no different. I’ve always found dreaming to be fascinating and suspicious— these wild worlds that disappeared by morning leaving sometimes not even a memory behind.

I’m particularly interested in recurring dreams and the magic we access easily in childhood that eludes us as we grow up. This dream held that magic of recurrence, returning to me again and again for several years and then disappearing in adulthood—until recently. As I was doing my own deeper inner child work I understood, quite completely and intuitively what that dream was trying to teach me. This dream, which I know call the “Three pools” revealed something essential about how I view the psyche, and how I approach therapy itself. 

Returning to the Dreamscape

The first pool

I am sitting at the edge of a retaining wall staring down at the water that’s collected at the bottom. My legs are dangling off the edge and the pool at the bottom is dark. Pitch blue if such a color exists.  I am often sitting with a friend or neighbor, just talking as if this is a very natural ledge for us to be at. 

The second pool

The second pool is one I almost always walk by but rarely sit at for long as I am hurried along by adults around me. The water is purple and gold glitter swirls up and out of this pool. I’m always fascinated by it and always find it slipping away. 

The third pool

The last pool is a shallow wading pool, identical to one from a park in my childhood. It is filled with gold fish. 

And occasionally the goldfish turn into pirhannas. 

Interpreting the three pools: A psyche in three parts

🌀 The First Pool: Depth and Shadow Work

For those of you who may be psychodynamic in nature this pool can be seen as the unconscious, or the stuff that is kept out or our awareness, murky and maybe painful.

Going  there feels like dangling your legs off a ledge and yet this practice doesn’t always have to feel scary. In fact you do not have to face these things alone. This is a place you visit with a therapist, friend or trusted spiritual guide. 

In my work, this pool shows up when we drop into the shadow:

• The experiences you didn’t get to choose

• The earliest pains you weren’t equipped to hold

• The beliefs that pierce you, creating strange structures inside of you that hold you together, but don’t allow for freedom
  

This is the kind of therapy that moves beneath words. The kind that takes courage, the transformative stuff that requires a hand to hold, and a leap into the darkness. 

✨ The Second Pool: Awe, Magic, and Flow

If the first pool is depth, the second pool is awe. 

This is the magic that we’re being forced to rush by or that is rushing by us. The second pool holds my inner witchling, my connection to source, my connection to play. 

I think of this pool every time I:

• Enter a flow state while creating worlds as I write

• Wear glitter to work

• Whip out the tarot cards in session

• Pause to celebrate and not just “process” with a client

In my life this pool is creation as spiritual growth and in my therapeutic work this is taking risks, exploring intuition and ancestral wisdom, and not being afraid to get silly. 

🐟 The Third Pool: Goldfish and Piranhas (aka the ADHD Mind)

Here we are at the shallow end, teeming with short memory goldfish and the occasional pirhanna—if that isn’t a metaphor for my ADHD brain I don’t know what is. 

But I believe this image can represent our direct consciousness, everything bubbling on a day to day basis. 

This is often what clients come into therapy wanting help with. 

• Their goldfish are slippery 

• or the pirhannas are constant and eating them alive

• or they want to get to the deep stuff but get stuck here.  

But this part of our brain is necessary— its holding all of our conscious thought! A lot of early therapy work or therapy work thats based more in skill building swims around these waters. 

What the water gave me 

I find it especially interesting that my dream has me start at the deepest pool and end at the most shallow. As if I dove to the bottom of a lake and slowly floated back up.

If I had started at the wading pool I may have never met the other spaces in this dream. 

The lessons that hit me the hardest are 

• Spend more time in the second pool.

• Bring someone with you into the first.

• Have compassion for the goldfish waters of your mind.

And while my clients are also jumping between the shallow end and the deep end, I ultimately want to help them find more space and access to their magic, their playful joy, their flow states. 

Truth or truth

It’s important for me as I share my own philosophy and a truth I think others could benefit from, to say that truth in itself has the nature of flight. It can be very grounded and very objective and at the same time it can be floating and changing and permeable based on perspective. 

As I’ve grown older and healed from my own religious trauma I have also become very skeptical about any bringer of singular truth— the ways we are obsessed with structuring truth and serving it back to each other and calling it new. 

I come into the therapy room knowing that I have both earned and unearned authority and there is no way to put that down. This is why I (and the many therapists I admire) encourage our clients to find their own truths. My hope is to use my authority as a tool of validation rather than a way to present myself (or my recurring dreams) as Miracle Cures. 

A Necessary Tangent (I Swear)

This is also why I identify as an integrative therapist—and why I often resist rigid certification culture (don’t worry, I love training!).

So many therapy modalities wrap themselves in jargon to stand out, when what really matters is what they share. Connection. Attunement. Humanity.

Research shows that the therapeutic relationship is the work or at the very least the crucial foundation for any of the other work. Modalities are paints. The relationship is the canvas. And without the canvas, we’re just squirting people in the face with paint. (Shoutout to anyone who’s ever been personally attacked by poorly delivered CBT.)

There’s also a strange MLM flavor to a lot of continuing ed, and I often find myself wondering: Did a nonwhite, non-male person say this first? Can I learn it from them directly?

(My therapy TBR list is very full. I’m okay with that.)

Fly With This Truth

If the image of the three pools is helpful, use it however you like. Adapt the language, change the metaphor, or toss it entirely—just take what resonates. What feels universal.

You can credit me if you’d like, but I know I’m not the only one who’s felt this way. These truths are shared. And truth, like flight, is meant to move freely.

Whether you’re wading, diving, or pausing at the edge—I hope this dream brings you somewhere meaningful.