Diving, Dread, and the Sublime

There is a particular feeling that sometimes arrives underwater before we can attach a thought to it. Breathing becomes conspicuous. The surrounding water suddenly feels larger, darker or less hospitable than it did a few seconds earlier. Nothing necessarily has gone wrong, but some involuntary part of the nervous system has reached a conclusion before the more articulate parts of the brain have caught up: something is wrong.

I think of that feeling as dread, and sooner or later most divers encounter some version of it. Diving culture, like most pursuits involving risk and adventure, has a complicated relationship with fear. We admire people who appear fearless, and we describe ourselves as becoming more comfortable underwater as we gain experience. A new diver apprehensive about descending into 30 feet (9 m) of clear water may eventually think nothing of a deep wreck, a night dive or floating over water so deep that the bottom has ceased to be relevant. But comfort and fearlessness are not the same thing, and I am not convinced that fearlessness is something divers should aspire to.

Experience can actually make our relationship with fear more complicated. We become capable of doing things that once frightened us while learning much more about what can go wrong. Our reactions aren't even particularly consistent. When a nine-foot (2.7 m) great white appeared on a dive, every sensible part of my brain knew to stay put and let it approach, while some considerably older part wanted to swim toward it. Yet looking into an abyss that poses no additional immediate danger can produce precisely the opposite response.

Søren Kierkegaard explored something similar in The Concept of Anxiety, sometimes translated as The Concept of Dread. He considered the anxiety of a person standing at the edge of an abyss: the fear of falling complicated by the realization that one could jump. He called anxiety the "dizziness of freedom," something that simultaneously attracts and repels us. Edmund Burke approached the experience differently through the idea of the sublime: encounters with vastness, power, obscurity, and even terror that overwhelm rather than simply please us. Burke specifically used the ocean to illustrate it. The sublime helps explain why an environment can make us profoundly uncomfortable and still compel us to enter it.

Divers encounter this strange territory between dread and wonder all the time. On one blackwater dive, suspended over approximately 640 feet (195 m) of water, I started to feel seasick because the seafloor was moving. There was, of course, no visible seafloor. Beneath us was an immense school of football-sized bonita traveling at roughly the same depth, extending to the limits of the light around our downline and undulating together. For a moment my brain had interpreted thousands of fish as terrain. Once I understood what I was seeing, the disorientation became astonishment.

Another blackwater dive went differently. At about 85 feet (26 m), while photographing a diamond squid, I noticed a massive, perfectly smooth black cone below me at perhaps 130 feet (40 m). I could see roughly 15 feet (4.6 m) of it before it continued into darkness. The dread was immediate and physical. Before I could decide what I was looking at, my body had already decided it wanted to be somewhere else. I made a controlled ascent and regrouped with the other divers. Our best explanation afterward was an enormous sheet of industrial black plastic drifting vertically through the water column. That is still the explanation I prefer, or perhaps simply the version of the story I tell myself.

What interests me is how quickly the body reacts to something the conscious mind cannot categorize. Dread is not necessarily rational, but neither is it useless. It tells us that something about the situation no longer fits our expectations. Sometimes the warning is misplaced; sometimes it deserves our immediate attention. This is also why dread is different from panic. Panic is a loss of useful control. Dread can occur while control remains entirely intact.

Some of my most uncomfortable dives illustrate the latter. Each year I photograph Goliath grouper aggregations on deep offshore wrecks in South Florida. The animals don't frighten me, but the diving can: depth, sweeping Gulf Stream currents, physical exertion, and limited opportunities to make the photographs I came for. Photography adds its own pressure. The charter isn't cheap, the conditions may only align a few times, and in your lying mind the picture you want is always just a little farther up the wreck. It becomes easy to work harder than you should.

Then you notice you're breathing too hard. The regulator that had been almost absent from conscious thought becomes extremely important. Exertion produces breathlessness, breathlessness produces anxiety, and anxiety encourages faster breathing. Dread has arrived, but panic has not. This is where training matters. You don't need to prove that you're tougher than the sensation, nor should you simply ignore it. Stop working. Breathe. Let your body catch up. Assess the situation and end the dive if necessary. Experience doesn't prevent the alarm from sounding; it gives us something useful to do when it does.

I wish divers talked more openly about these moments. We readily discuss gas consumption, decompression obligations, current, and equipment failures, yet admitting that something frightened us can feel strangely embarrassing, particularly when nothing objectively went wrong. It is easy to assume that everyone else is more comfortable underwater than you are. They aren't. Dread is not evidence that you failed a dive or that you are weak or inexperienced. We enter an environment where we cannot breathe without equipment, where depth and current matter and where our senses can be unreliable. A nervous system that occasionally objects to this arrangement is functioning as advertised. I would be more concerned about a diver who pushed boundaries and never felt fear than one willing to acknowledge it.

What matters is how we respond. Sometimes dread is telling us to stop, and we should listen. Sometimes it is simply telling us that we have reached the edge of what is familiar, and growth often requires spending some time there. The difficult skill is learning to distinguish discomfort from danger without letting ego, money, or the pressure to make a photograph make that decision for us.

We should also tell our buddies when it happens. Say that the depth got into your head, the current made you uncomfortable, or staring into the blue produced a feeling you couldn't explain. Those conversations should be as ordinary as discussing a leaking mask or an unexpectedly strong current. Hearing that an experienced diver sometimes feels dread may be exactly what another diver needs to understand that there is nothing wrong with them when they feel it too.

Becoming a better diver should not mean becoming fearless. It should mean becoming better at recognizing fear, functioning through it when appropriate, and respecting it when it tells us to stop. Anyone who continues pushing beyond the familiar will eventually reach a boundary where the body notices before the intellect does. Dread is part of that process, and perhaps part of the sublime experience that keeps drawing us underwater in the first place. The goal is not to stop being afraid. It is to become capable while afraid, and comfortable enough with that fact to say so.