When the Water Spoke: A Letter and Its Echoes

Setting the Scene

I reluctantly slipped into the pool as the evening cooled, the hesitation coming from how it usually feels on first contact. Even at 28 to 29 degrees it often hits with a sharper chill than I expect, and I always brace for that moment. This time it was different. The water felt lukewarm, like a forgotten cup of tea, soft, muted, almost neutral. I let myself settle into it, surprised by the ease, and allowed the water to carry my weight.

A Quiet Dip Turns Into a Swim

At first I floated, eyes half‑closed, relieved that it didn’t carry its usual bite... Then, without warning, the words arrived. They slipped in softly at the edges, a low humming presence. As I became more aware, the voices began to arrange themselves... each one trying to rise above the others. I couldn’t make out a single thing they were saying.

Instinctively I whispered, “Please slow down, one at a time,” as if I were standing at a crowded doorway.  To my surprise, the voices quieted.  One presence came forward, spoke, then stepped back.  Another followed.  I wasn’t scared; I was curious.  It was as if my attention had become a little queue manager, letting one message at a time into awareness.

When I thought about this later, the way the messages organised themselves reminded me of how our minds seem to work: lots of things happen at once outside of awareness, but consciousness can only really handle one thing at a time.  Cognitive scientists have called this a “global workspace,” where many processes are running in the background but only one grabs the spotlight .  Asking the voices to queue felt like working with that limitation instead of being overwhelmed by it.

Familiar Voices and a Living Network

The first clear voice felt like my father‑in‑law.  He’s been gone for years, but here was the feel of his voice: soft, deep, matter‑of‑fact.  He seemed to be speaking through me to my wife.  Without filtering or editing, I relayed what came.  At one point I felt pressure at the back of my head, like a pulse.  A thought accompanied it: “Trust the signal.  Don’t add your own noise.”  I let the words flow until there was a sense of completion.  Afterwards, I was both drained and relieved, like after a long heartfelt conversation.

Later, a friend’s name surfaced, along with a vivid memory of him calling his pool an “antenna.”  Suddenly I sensed that our pools were connected, that there was a network of quiet water where people – maybe without realising – tune into something bigger.  A brief image of an Indigenous elder appeared, reminding me of woven dream catchers I’d heard about as a child.  Those hoops were said to filter bad dreams and let good ones pass .  My own pool felt like that: a web catching noise and letting clear messages through.

These impressions carried me beyond my family into an older world.  The idea of networked pools sounds fanciful, yet Indigenous cultures have long described knowledge being stored and shared through land, song and ceremony.  The dream catcher analogy isn’t about mysticism but about selective filtering – letting some experiences in and keeping others out.  In that way it is similar to how our nervous systems filter sensory input.

A Cow and a Whisper from Far Away

At one point I couldn’t help but laugh.  In my mind’s eye there was suddenly a cow standing in a field, looking at me with that blank, curious stare only cows have.  There was no message.  Just a cow.  The absurdity lifted the intensity of the session for a moment.

Then I felt a pull toward India.  There was no picture, just a sense of direction and a mathematical flavour.  Months earlier I had blurted out to my brother‑in‑law something about there being a link between me, Satyendra Nath Bose and Albert Einstein.  At the time it felt like nonsense.  Now, in the pool, that stray thought came back with a gentle urgency.  I felt like there was a loop that wanted to close.

Humour matters here.  Laughter releases tension and resets the system, much like the cow did for me.  As for the India connection, Bose and Einstein collaborated on work that led to the concept of Bose–Einstein condensates, where many particles act as one .  That idea – separate things overlapping, forming a coherent whole – mirrors the sense I had of my thoughts and these messages intersecting.

Managing Energy and Leaving Gracefully

As the session went on, I noticed a difference between when I was simply receiving impressions and when I was relaying emotional messages.  When my father‑in‑law poured through, I felt depleted, as if I had used up my battery.  When other impressions came, especially lighter ones like the cow, I felt steadier.  After about an hour I realised I was tired.  I thanked the presences waiting, told them I needed to stop and dunked my head under.  Water over the face brought me back.  I climbed out, dried off, drank water and ate four squares of Cadbury Dream (white chocolate).

Honouring endings turned out to be important.  Body‑based therapies suggest that after intense emotional work it helps to ground – to hydrate, eat and come back into the senses .  Setting boundaries, like saying “this session is closed,” teaches both the mind and whatever else might be listening that there are office hours.  Otherwise it feels as if the door is always open and I end up exhausted.  Paying attention to how my body felt – heavy, light, buzzing – helped me distinguish between high‑energy emotional transmissions and low‑energy information downloads.

Looking Back

I don’t have a grand theory about what happened.  I know my mind can generate rich imagery, and I know how it feels when I’m making something up.  This felt different, mostly because of the unexpected clarity and the sense of being part of a conversation rather than just a witness.  It made me realise how much my body participates in thought.  Scientists have found that emotions and trauma can lodge in muscles and organs, and that paying attention to bodily sensations can help release them .  Our brains contain neurons that mirror the actions and feelings of others, allowing us to empathise .  Some philosophers argue that tools and spaces outside us – like notebooks or a calm pool – become part of our thinking .  Indigenous wisdom teaches that land and story are intertwined.  All of these ideas resonate with my pool experience.

What stayed with me most was the idea of being a relay.  Not a channel in the mystical sense, but a communications bridge.  There’s comfort in knowing that I can set protocols: asking messages to queue, recognising when a high‑intensity transmission is happening, grounding afterwards, and deciding when to open and close the line.  I’ll keep exploring, not to prove anything, but to better understand how our bodies, minds and environment collaborate in ways we seldom notice.