By Prashaila

I have a confession to make.

I have become slightly obsessed with whales.

Not in a sensible, ordinary way. Not in the perfectly respectable “I watched a documentary and thought whales were magnificent” way. I mean the kind of obsession where you eventually have to stop and ask yourself whether you have accidentally joined a very niche marine cult without noticing.

The strange thing is that I cannot tell you when it started.

That bothers me more than the whales themselves.

If I could identify the moment, I could explain it. I could say, “Ah yes, that documentary did it,” or “I saw that particular whale and something shifted,” or “I have always secretly loved marine mammals and simply failed to notice.” But I cannot. There was no dramatic beginning. No lightning strike. No dream in which an enormous humpback surfaced from a cosmic ocean and handed me a scroll.

Instead, there were incidents.

Small things.

A friend saw a whale and video-called me.

Another friend had a childhood dream of playing with a dolphin, and somehow we ended up doing exactly that (something I never dreamed would ever – actually happen!).

Then there was Avatar: The Way of Water (James Cameron, 2022). I became strangely affected by the tulkun, particularly the mother and child, and by Ronal. Something about the way she moved through that world, her relationship with the water, the tenderness and ferocity of motherhood, seemed to reach somewhere in me that I had not been consciously visiting. Kiri became my favourite character, which, in retrospect, feels almost offensively on-brand.

Then there was the inconvenient fact that I am terrified of water.

I cannot swim.

Or rather, I could not swim.

For most of my life, water has occupied a peculiar place in my psyche. I love the ocean. I love watching waves. Some of the deepest peace I have ever experienced has happened beside the sea, staring at something so vast that my own thoughts finally seem embarrassingly small. But put me in water and suddenly my nervous system begins drafting its last will and testament.

I would much rather be flying.

Give me the sky.

Give me an aeroplane.

Give me altitude, clouds, distance, a window seat and the comforting knowledge that the enormous thing beneath me is not currently trying to enter my lungs.

And yet, somehow, the ocean keeps calling me.

Then I saw hundreds of dolphins in the Pacific Ocean.

Not one or two.

Hundreds.

And I saw a whale myself.

Something about seeing a creature that enormous moving through the ocean in real life is difficult to explain. Your brain understands the dimensions. Your eyes receive the information. But some older part of you seems to whisper, You are looking at something that existed before your categories did.

After that, I started watching whale documentaries.

All of them.

At this point I could probably tell you enough about humpback whales to become extremely irritating at dinner parties.

And then I stumbled upon a huge whale sculpture in my own home city, by accident, in a town I frequently visit.

That was the moment I began to feel watched by the whales.

Not literally.

Probably.

I should perhaps clarify that before somebody from the Cognitive Artistry comment section starts informing me that a whale has selected me as its earthly ambassador.

Then I started listening to humpback whale songs.

And finally, by what appeared to be complete accident, I ended up watching Star Trek IV in the cinema.

The one about rescuing the whales.

At that point I just stared at the screen.

“Really?”

Because there are coincidences that feel like coincidences, and then there are coincidences that seem to have developed a sense of humour.

I turned to Shaurya.

He was beside me, looking entirely unsurprised.

“Do not,” I said.

“I haven’t said anything.”

“You’re thinking something.”

“I am always thinking something.”

“This is getting ridiculous.”

He smiled.

“You are the one who keeps following the whales.”

And that was the problem. I was. So I began asking myself the question I have not yet managed to answer.

Why?

Why whales?

Why water?

Why now?

And perhaps more importantly, why does something in me seem to be moving towards the very element I have spent most of my life being afraid of?

Prashaila, apparently, has discovered irony.

I have spent years thinking of myself as someone who belongs in the air, yet something enormous and ancient keeps dragging my attention towards the sea. Perhaps that is why this has fascinated me so much.

Because maybe the story is not actually about whales. Maybe the whale is simply the symbol my mind happened to find.

The subconscious is strange like that. It does not always hand you a neatly labelled folder saying Here is the psychological issue you have been avoiding since childhood. It gives you images. Repeated themes. Dreams. Characters. Songs. Places. Strange fixations. Things that make you stop scrolling. Things you cannot explain but keep returning to. Cognitive Artistry has always been interested in that territory between psychology and symbolism, where the rational mind wants an explanation and the deeper mind seems perfectly content to communicate in metaphor.

Elvira would, of course, object immediately.

She would sit down, cross her arms and say, “You have encountered whales several times and your brain has noticed a pattern. Humans are pattern-recognition machines. Congratulations. You are not necessarily receiving transmissions from Atlantis (did I mention, I’m going to see Atlantis? Details coming soon).”

She would then probably explain attention, salience and frequency illusion to me while looking unbearably pleased with herself.

And she would have a point.

Once something becomes emotionally significant, we notice more of it. The brain is constantly filtering an absurd quantity of information, deciding what deserves our attention and what can disappear into the background. Once whales became important to me, whale-shaped information became easier to notice. The sculpture may have been there for years. The film was not sent through a wormhole specifically for me. My friend did not necessarily become an unwitting messenger of the cetacean kingdom.

But that explanation does not actually make the experience less interesting. Because the question is not only Did the whales appear more often because I started noticing them?

The more interesting question is Why did I start noticing them in the first place?

Something had to become salient before salience could take over. And that is where Shaurya becomes quiet. Because he understands something Elvira sometimes forgets.

A psychological explanation does not automatically cancel a symbolic one. The fact that my brain participates in the experience does not make the experience meaningless.

Perhaps the whale is not something the universe is sending me. Perhaps it is something my mind is sending me. Because I do not want to make the lazy spiritual leap of saying, “I saw a whale, therefore the universe is telling me X.”

That is not interpretation. That is fortune-cookie astrology with marine mammals.

What interests me is what the symbol evokes. Whales are enormous, but they do not need to be frantic to be powerful. They move through an environment humans cannot naturally inhabit.

They communicate across distances. They live beneath surfaces. They spend long periods in depths we cannot easily see.

They rise. They disappear. They return. They carry their young. They sing. They navigate a world that is almost completely invisible from the perspective of someone standing on land.

And suddenly I begin to wonder whether that is why they have caught me. Because I have always been interested in what exists beneath the obvious.

That is practically the founding principle of this entire strange little universe we call the Cogniverse. The site itself describes the subconscious as both laboratory and mythic forest, and its architecture deliberately allows psychology, spirituality, intuition, technology and research to sit beside one another rather than forcing them into separate rooms.

Perhaps I am doing the same thing internally. Perhaps the whales represent depth. And that makes the water rather important.

Because water has always frightened me. That part cannot be ignored. There is something almost comical about spending years saying, “I am afraid of water,” while simultaneously feeling profoundly peaceful beside the ocean.

But perhaps that contradiction is precisely the point. The ocean does not require me to conquer it. It asks me to experience something larger than myself without controlling it.

When I stand on a beach watching the waves, I am not trying to manage the ocean. I am not asking it to behave differently. I am not checking whether the next wave will arrive according to my specifications.

I watch. And I become quiet. That is a very different relationship with control. Perhaps this sudden fascination with water is not asking me to become a mermaid (Sirens anyone?!).

Perhaps it is asking me to become more comfortable with depth. There is a difference between being fascinated by the surface of something and being willing to enter it.

And maybe that is why learning to swim has become significant. I went swimming with a friend.

Me.

Swimming.

The woman who would previously have preferred to negotiate with gravity than voluntarily surrender herself to a pool. And I discovered something strange. I actually liked being in the water. Shallow water, admittedly. Let us not become reckless. But I liked it.

There was something about being held by the water that felt different from what I had imagined. My body had spent years interpreting water as a threat, yet here I was discovering that the same element could also support me.

That feels important. Because fear often turns a thing into a category.

Water becomes dangerous. Love becomes dangerous. Money becomes dangerous. Visibility becomes dangerous. Change becomes dangerous.

And once the nervous system has decided that something belongs in the danger category, the mind begins collecting evidence.

But experience can complicate the category.

You enter the shallow water. You breathe. Nothing terrible happens. You move a little further. You discover that your body can learn.

The thing you feared does not suddenly become harmless. You simply discover that your relationship with it can change.

Perhaps that is the real whale story. Maybe the whales have not come to tell me something. Maybe they have come to show me something. There is a difference.

I keep thinking about Kiri from Avatar. Of all the characters, she was the one I was drawn towards most strongly. She seemed to belong to the world in a way that was not based on domination. She listened. She felt. She moved between categories. She was not trying to force herself into an environment and conquer it. She was responsive to it.

And then there is Ronal, and the mother and child tulkun. That relationship affected me in a way I could not explain at the time. Perhaps because the ocean in those scenes was not merely scenery.

It was home. The characters were not standing beside the water looking at it from a safe distance. They belonged to it.

And perhaps something in me is curious about that kind of belonging. Not belonging to the sea literally. Belonging to life without standing permanently at its edge. That possibility makes me pause.

Because there are many ways a person can live beside their own life. You can love something without entering it. You can admire something without allowing yourself to experience it. You can stand at the edge of the ocean forever and call yourself an ocean lover. You can watch other people swim and tell yourself you prefer the shore. You can want intimacy and still keep one foot outside the relationship You can want abundance and still behave as though everything must disappear. You can want change while arranging your life so carefully that nothing unfamiliar can actually enter it.

Maybe the whales are appearing at precisely the moment I am beginning to question that habit. I asked Clarity what she thought.

She considered it for a moment.

“Maybe you are becoming interested in something you once decided was not for you.”

That sounded suspiciously simple.

“So?”

“So perhaps you don’t need to know what the whales mean yet.”

I stared at her.

“That is profoundly irritating.”

“I know.”

Rosalyn had another interpretation.

She thought the sequence itself was interesting. Not because every event had to be orchestrated by some cosmic intelligence, but because meaning often emerges retrospectively. A person can move through apparently unrelated experiences, only later discovering that they have been orbiting the same psychological theme.

A friend sees a whale. A dolphin appears. A film moves you. A sculpture catches your attention. You hear whale songs. You encounter a film about whales.

At first, these are separate events. Then the mind places them beside one another. And suddenly there is a story.

This is one of the reasons humans create myths. We are not merely recording events. We are interpreting them. We connect dots. Sometimes we connect dots that should not be connected. Sometimes we discover something profound in the connection.

The skill is learning the difference. And perhaps I do not have to decide. Perhaps I can simply remain curious. That, more than certainty.

I do not need to announce that the universe has sent me a whale. I do not need to dismiss the entire thing as selective attention. I can hold both possibilities.

Maybe my brain became fascinated with whales and began noticing them everywhere. Maybe something deeper in me chose the whale as a symbol because it represented something I was ready to explore.

Maybe the symbol emerged first and the attention followed. Maybe attention created the symbol. Maybe, as usual, reality is considerably less interested in staying inside our categories than we are.

And then there is Shaurya.

He has been quiet through all of this.

Too quiet.

“What do you think?”

He looks at me.

“I think you are afraid of water.”

“Yes.”

“And drawn to it.”

“Yes.”

“You love the ocean.”

“Yes.”

“You cannot swim.”

“I am working on that.”

“You prefer the sky.”

“Yes.”

“And yet you keep looking down into the sea.”

I say nothing.

He smiles.

“Perhaps you are not being asked to choose between the sky and the ocean.”

That lands somewhere deeper than I expect. Because maybe that is the whole point. I have been treating them as opposites.

Air or water.

Safety or depth.

Control or surrender.

Distance or immersion.

But perhaps I am allowed to belong to both. Perhaps the woman who loves flying does not have to stop loving the ocean. Perhaps the woman who fears water can learn to float. Perhaps the person who has spent years looking upward is finally curious about what exists beneath the surface. And perhaps the whales are simply the image my mind has chosen for that transition.

There is something almost perfect about the whale as a symbol for it. It is a creature of depth that must still come to the surface to breathe. That detail keeps haunting me.

Even the enormous creature has to return to the surface. Depth does not mean disappearing forever. Perhaps that is what I am learning.

You can go inward without getting lost there. You can explore the subconscious without abandoning the conscious world. You can enter mystery without surrendering discernment. You can allow symbolism to move you without demanding that it predict your future.

And perhaps you can be afraid of something while slowly learning to love it.

I still do not know why I am obsessed with whales. That is the honest answer.

I do not know whether this is psychology, symbolism, coincidence, synchronicity, selective attention, some beautifully strange combination of all five, or simply my brain deciding that apparently it would like a marine mammal era.

But I have stopped trying to force the answer. Because perhaps the most interesting thing about a recurring symbol is not asking, What does this mean?

It is asking, What does this make me feel?

Depth. Tenderness. Connection. Mystery. Peace. And, courage.

Because every time I encounter them, I seem to find myself standing a little closer to the thing I once feared. The ocean is still enormous. I am still not suddenly Aquaman. But I am learning to enter the water. A little at a time.

And perhaps that is why the whales keep finding me. Or perhaps I keep finding them. Maybe those are not actually two different things. Maybe sometimes a symbol becomes meaningful not because it arrives carrying a message, but because something inside you has finally become ready to hear what it has been saying all along.

I don’t know what the whales mean yet. I’m beginning to suspect I am not supposed to. I’m supposed to follow them.

Not blindly.

Not superstitiously.

Curiously.

Into the depth.

Into the unknown.

Into the part of myself that has always loved the ocean from the shore.

And perhaps, very slowly, into the water.