Turn the wind around

1/2 a lifetime.

That’s how long I’ve been freediving for, and also the time between two of the most portentous dreams I’ve had.

Preparing for a dive: image by Daan Verhoeven at VB 2025

In early 2003, when I was learning to freedive in Utila, Honduras, I had one of those dreams that are so vivid and compelling that you know it’s more than just your unconscious mind doodling on the pillow.

My oldest childhood friend appeared and told me repeatedly, ‘Stand in your dream,’ before shaking my hand and vanishing.

At that time I took it as an affirmation that I was on the right path – that I had begun my dharma, or my ‘personal legend’ as King Salem calls it in Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist.

In my autobiography, Oxygen, I wrote: This was my dream, but to inhabit it I would have to stand true, and weather the winds of opposition that challenge us in our course. As the Māori proverb says,

Tama tū, tama ora  (He who stands lives) Tama moe, tama mate  (He who sleeps dies)

Now, at the age of 45 and 1/2 years old, meaning I'm exactly twice the age I was in that first dream, I had a second one that was just as vivid and compelling.

In it I was cycling past stopped traffic, with a friend telling me about a champion cyclist who had won a prestigious cycling race three times. When asked how he did it, he'd explained, “I always pretend I have the wind at my back.”

This was the message of the dream, but at that exact moment I somehow dropped my phone and it tumbled under one of the cars waiting at the light.  I stopped quickly, telling my friend I had to find my phone before the green light.

And that’s how I woke, frantically searching between the wheels of these cars before they took off, but with those words also ringing in my ears…

And I realised the message was twofold.

First, smart phones are devised to enhance communication, but all too often they prevent us from hearing the real, important messages. The effect is only becoming more prominent, and I'm by no means immune.

Second, even when the wind is in our face, trying to beat us back, we have to convince ourselves that it’s actually behind us, spurring us on.

As a teenager I spent two years cycling road races up to 120km, and I remember that feeling of a tail wind being like a soft hand on your lower back.

Another friend Ricardo Sobral, who is both freediver and cyclist, had this to add:

“You are absolutely right—fighting a headwind is often a greater force than weight alone. For example, a 70kg rider fighting a 30km/h headwind suffers more than a 120kg rider fighting a 15km/h headwind.”

Image by Luis Lamar in Dean's Blue Hole

I woke knowing that the dream was making me a very clear reference to the first 6 years of this decade. 

Since 2020 it’s seemed like there’s been an opposing wind that’s climbing in strength.  My response was always to push harder to match it, and I was finally making headway, in the lead up to the end-of-year event here in Dominica.

I felt like I’d done everything necessary and taken every precaution to avoid snags or setbacks.

But then I had still been derailed.

Blown off the bike by a malady that hit me like a sudden crosswind gust.

By the time I’d realised what it was, my usual methods for fighting off such things were on the back foot.  And I spiralled. 

I spent an afternoon and evening playing online speed chess, badly, watching my rating tumble (it’s my only addiction, that comes out in rare dark moments - the closest thing I have to reaching for a whisky bottle).  I tossed and turned awake at night, seething over the lost opportunity I'd been working towards, and sacrificed time with my family.

Dives that I'd done twice in one session, and with ease, were now impossible to do once clean.

In freediving, performance is built on the twin pillars of physical condition and confidence, and both had been knocked sideways.

Then came the dream.  The reminder of relativity.

Image by Allie Reilly, BE 2025

While it’s impossible to salvage the original intention and goals for this period, I can still imagine that I am in fact mistaken.  I can pretend it’s all been a tail wind, that will continue driving me on.

I’ve done at least one dive here that felt good: a training dive to 92 meters CNF, that was smooth, easy, and fast (dive time 3:23).

The unique feature of this particular dive was that in the ascent I felt like I was being buffeted upwards.

It’s a sensation that I’ve never experienced before, and one that must have been entirely in my head (vertical currents are pretty much impossible, especially in open sea).

But it made me realise that maybe we can imagine into place the forces that seem external to us.

Maybe imagining a tailwind can actually create one.

Image by Allie Reilly, BE 2025