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A Fish Story


Here's a story about a very unusual experience that I had in connection with the Regenerating Images in Memory (RIM) technique that my research team is currently studying. It's a fish story, and like all good fish stories you can decide what you'd like to believe about it.

At the end of the fall semester, when everyone was overwhelmed with final grades and holiday events, my colleague Laurra Aagaard led an activity in our monthly faculty meeting to help us manage our stress. After asking us to close our eyes and breathe deeply, she asked us to descend into whatever part of our body felt like a source of calm in the end-of-the-semester storm. For me, this felt like sinking deep into my chest, but also like I was going deep underwater. It was calm and cool there, far from the activity back up on the surface. Laurra suggested that a resource would appear to support us. Because I was underwater, what I noticed near me was a fish. 

It wasn't just any fish. In fact, I realized that I knew this fish. Her name was Goldenflower, and she was a lyretail panda molly from my daughter's fish tank. The actual Goldenflower had in fact died about a month before this. But she was a very distinctive fish, and it was clearly her in my experience. Although I knew I was sitting in my chair in a conference room, with my faculty colleagues around me, I also very strongly felt that I was underwater talking to Goldenflower. 

I actually didn't like Goldenflower very much in life: She was the largest fish in the tank, and she seemed mean. She often swam aggressively at the other fish, sometimes biting them. There were baby fish in the tank a few times (mollys are live bearers), and we were pretty sure that Goldenflower had eaten a number of them. I distinctly remember thinking, "really? Goldenflower?" and checking again. Yes, it was definitely her, and no, she wasn't going anywhere.

Laurra asked us what message our resource had for us during this challenging time. OK, I thought, I will talk to the fish. When I asked Goldenflower what she wanted to tell me, she said this: "I am a big fish." Yes, I thought, and not a very nice one! "I am a big fish," she repeated. "When something gets in my way, I eat it." I then proceeded to argue with the fish. I told her that wasn't OK, and it seemed aggressive, and that it wasn't a good way to live. (My children find this part very amusing: You met your spirit animal, Dad, and you argued with her, they said. Yeah, that sounds a lot like you!) Goldenflower was impassive, and just repeated again "I am a big fish." The exercise was coming toward the end, and I demanded to know why she was telling me this. "You are a big fish," she said. "If you have troubles, eat them. Be a big fish."

That was it. I came up out of the water and back to myself, with more questions than answers. But I have returned to that message multiple times since, when something stressful comes my way. "It can't bother me," I think, "I am a big fish." This is not something that comes to me naturally. When I later told Laurra what I had seen, she laughed and said, "Paul, you're probably the nicest big fish I know." But perhaps it is an aspect of myself that I need more of, not taking things on that I don't need to own. It still feels a bit over the top to me, but something about the fish encounter gave me permission to change my own approach. The whole thing has a Jungian "anima" feel, as though Goldenflower was an aspect of universal consciousness breaking through into my own experience with a message I needed to hear. 

My experience is not atypical of what happens to many people during RIM. They frequently report that the imagery has a very intense quality, a "more real than reality" feel to it. There is also what's sometimes described as an "ineffable" quality, the idea that the experience is important but also difficult to put into words. Over time, other people in the participant's life often comment that something seems different about them, which is something that Laurra also reflected back to me. She said that I seemed more comfortable or relaxed in recent weeks, which might have been related to the fish encounter. 

Again, you can take this fish story for whatever it's worth. I thought it was an interesting example of the surprising truths that can sometimes bubble up from the Intuitive mind, in ways that the more logical Narrative mind was least expecting.

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