59. New Dreams. In Sophie’s next journal entry, she writes that Mo is trying to be kinder to Cody—Mo’s stopped barking at him and calling him names. She says that Cody doesn’t seem to know how to interpret his father’s new behavior. Sophie also says that Uncle Stew seems calmer and nicer, even now, after the nearly fatal wave, when there are so many things he could be worrying about. Stew even gets a bit sentimental, saying that as a parent sometimes you have to realize that you can’t control everything in your child’s life, and you just have to “let go and pray” that your kid will be okay on their own. Sophie writes that she wonders if the same is true for children—that sometimes they have to let go of their parents.
Sophie then writes that she keeps thinking about the dream of The Wave that she always has. She says that the wave of her dreams was exactly the same height and shape of the wave that happened in real life, only the former was black, while the latter was white. While she was always on land in her dreams when the wave hit, now the dreams have changed for the worse—she’s always on a boat now, and when the wave comes, it sweeps her far away. Whereas before, when she was on land in her dreams, she could start piling up sand bags as a barrier against the wave, now she’s utterly helpless in her new dreams. She says she can’t rid herself of the feeling that all her old dreams were pointing to the nearly fatal wave she encountered in real life on the ocean.
Sophie then mentions a discussion she had with Cody about life. They wondered if people actually ever die, of if they just leave forever, “leaving other planes behind.” They speculate that, whenever you come near to death, you actually do die—on one plane—but your life continues on another plane, and you don’t notice that you died on the old one. They wonder if maybe an individual human isn’t made up of just one life, but rather millions of different lives on different planes.
Here, we see a rare side of both Mo and Stew—Mo is trying the be nice to Cody and mend their broken relationship, while Stew is being unusually sentimental about the duties of parenthood. While Stew is typically a control freak, here he insists that, when it comes to being a good parent, you have to accept the fact that you are actually not in total control of your child’s life—that you must even pray for them. It’s appropriate that Sophie wonders about children needing to let go of their parents—as this very problem consistently haunts her psyche.
Sophie’s encounter with The Wave of real life has affected her nightmarish visions of The Wave in her dreams. Now the latter always succeeds in sweeping her away, whereas before she would always wake up just in time. Furthermore, her comment that the wave of her dreams pointed to the wave in real life reveals, to some extent, how she’s starting to realize, on some level, that braving the ocean was a way for her to tryand master the fear fueled by the waves of her dreams—that braving the ocean was a way to try and conquer her fear of water.
Having faced death in the middle of the ocean, Sophie and Cody wonder about a profound thought: perhaps they did actually die when the wave struck, but were reborn before they could notice. Faced with the vastness of the ocean, they wonder if life itself is so vast that one human life is actually many millions of lives. The ocean has forced them to think on this larger scale.