I was thinking about the prevalence of Ship imagery in my visions since my awakening and got to wondering about its archetypal significance.  It’s related to my Inner Journey, which has always heavily featured Water.  I’ve found myself in everything from a canoe to a giant cargo carrier to a submarine to a sky ship to a spaceship, the latter two of which invoked Air in addition to Water.  If you go back far enough, ships have strong correspondences to death, rebirth, and magic (Egyptians), as well as the vulva, the womb, and the grave (Mesopotamia).  Boats are often depicted as carriers of a dead person to the next life, sometimes aflame (Igor Medvedev-Mead: “Soul Boats”, San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal, 2005).

On one of these Inner Ship journeys, I apparently took what Carl Jung called the Night Sea Journey: taking a Ship East towards the Darkness, away from and against the usual flow of energy.  Given the positions of the Sun and Moon on my Beach and the fact that it was dark there, I did indeed go relatively East to get there, on the Ship I took from my Island, where Saturn lived and still lives.  This Night Sea Journey is an immersion into the unconscious, which certainly fits with my experience of recent years.  Part of this journey involves being swallowed by a sea monster or dragon, and I recall quite clearly swimming off my Beach and being swallowed by a large, dark shape beneath me.  In its belly was an old Victorian study that seemed to say, “Sit, read, and rest.”

I spent a lot of time on this Beach and in the Victorian study in the Dragon’s Belly, going back and forth between them as I essentially rested in preparation for the next part of my Journey.  Strangely, within my inner landscape, no matter where I went, the Victorian study went with me, and I could use it to access the Beach regardless of my ‘location’.  So when I and all of my different ‘parts’ boarded the Ship again and left the Beach, in a way, we didn’t really leave.  I think the Dragon’s Belly represents a need to retreat into the unconscious, for me anyway.

As I said, the Ship itself has changed form many times to suit different purposes.  It began as a canoe in a canyon on a river in daylight, and after a short time reached a shoreline destination cloaked in darkness, then transformed into a dirty dinghy helmed by Charon, the underworld ferryman from Greek mythology.  I paid him as I knew I should, and he transported me across the dark, foggy waters to an Island upon which was perched a dilapidated, haunted looking house with no lights.  Charon himself disappeared, leaving the Ship in the form of the dinghy.

As I approached the house, several figures emerged, mostly children and all very happy to see me, delighted I was there to rescue them.  I was surprised by this but went with it, turning to the Ship so we could all leave, and discovering that it had transformed into a large fishing boat to accommodate everyone.  We all boarded and got on our way away from the Island, which was something of a mental prison everyone had been trapped on.

The next part of the journey was perilous, representing the weight of the baggage and damage I was dealing with at the time.  When we set off from the Island in the fishing boat, the Sea was fine, but over time it turned stormy.  Fishing boats are meant to handle storms, but even this was overwhelming for my mental Ship, so my mind transformed it into something more substantial: a cargo ship.  Appropriate since I was carrying so much mental cargo.

The cargo ship was sufficient for a time, but eventually things became so stormy that it required diving below the surface for calmer water, which meant transforming the Ship into a submarine.  This was good in that it separated me mentally from the things that were bothering me, but it was bad in that I was putting myself under immense emotional pressure.

Finally, I felt I had spent enough time ‘under water’ and decided to rise above the storm of my mind, which in hindsight may have been the first hints of the episode that sent me to the hospital.  I surfaced my submarine, and then it transformed into something that was able to fly, and I rose above the storm clouds roiling the Sea.  Above the clouds, there were vortices within them that threatened to suck the Ship in, and I had to navigate around these.  These represented forces within my psyche with their roots in childhood that I did not understand until later.  At the time, they were just nameless images.

At last I reached a vortex that didn’t look threatening like the others, and I allowed the Ship to spiral to its bottom.  The Ship came to rest close to the base of a great Tree with steps that went up its trunk, which stretched into the sky so high that the canopy was obscured.  All of the passengers except myself disembarked and went up the stairs.  I stayed with the Ship for a long time, until I essentially rescued myself much later and took my own self up the stairs, too.  I know that sounds odd because the passengers and my rescuer were simply aspects of myself, but that’s what happens when you fracture into pieces.

The next time I saw the Ship, or a variation on it, was after I had been carried up the Tree and sent to the Valley, the centerpiece of my inner landscape.  I had convalesced in this place for a while, corresponding to a period in my real life of essentially doing the same thing: resting and healing.  After I was feeling better, I mentally explored this new place I was in, and there was the Ship again, in spaceship form this time.  I laughed inwardly and boarded the craft, taking it out briefly to fly around before quickly docking again, feeling sort of weird flying a spaceship around in my head.

I spent more time in the Valley processing and healing, at least a year, a process that itself yielded many more visualizations.  After this time period was over, it was time to leave, a tale I relate in the post “The House on the Cliff”.  I found it interesting that the Ship had once again reverted to a fishing boat.  Why a fishing boat?  Perhaps because I was a fan of Deadliest Catch and grew to view each of the boat’s crews as families that worked together to endure great hardship, just as I and my inner ‘crew’ had to do.

The Captain of the Ship (that’s me) is essentially retired from her job, which isn’t to say she/I doesn’t still bear an interest in the Sea.  To me, the Sea represents the psyche itself, with the surface being what people see.  If we trust people enough, we’ll let our waters be calm enough for them to float on our surface and peer beneath it, even dive below.  The waters that the sunlight can penetrate constitute the conscious part of the psyche.  Below that lies the subconscious: palpable but unseen unless effort is made.  Go deep enough into the ocean and you will encounter the thermocline: the point at which the literal Hadean depths begin, where the dark and the cold and the pressure prohibit all but the hardiest and strangest life forms.  In this metaphor, that’s the unconscious, the bottom of our psyche that hides both monsters and rich fertility.  It is where we as individuals connect to the collective unconscious, that place where both sleeping and waking dreams emerge from.

I consider my Inner Journey on this Inner Ship to have been an exploration of this psychic ocean, and like any ocean explorer, I have encountered storms and monsters, but also great beauty and treasures.  This was not just a lark that my mind decided to embark on, it had a purpose, which was to heal me as quickly and efficiently as possible from a lifetime of damage, a mission which is well on its way to being accomplished.  The Captain and her crew are enjoying a well-deserved shore leave of indeterminate length, finally at Home, some of them for the first time ever.

As with my other healing visualizations, I have no doubt my mind will continue to come up with creative ways to teach me things I need to know, and I will do my best to continue to listen.  Carl Jung thought that the process of individuation, which involves the same kind of inner contemplation that I’ve been doing, essentially involved getting in touch with your True spiritual Self, your core being, and working with one’s True spiritual Self requires trusting your intuition.  That has been a repeating message from everywhere to me for over five years: trust the process.  When I look back at my Path, I see that the times when I have been the most unstable and fearful have been the times when I did not trust either the process or my intuition, for whatever reason.  Sometimes it was because I lacked hope to get me through the darkness.

The Ship has not disappeared. It remains docked in fishing boat form near the House, ready for use when necessary. At the moment, it gets used to clean flotsam and jetsam out of the Sea, which represents junk in my psyche I don’t want or need.  I may need it again for another future odyssey, although I hope not.  My little jaunt around the psychic seas took a lot out of me, although it also gave me a lot.  Maybe I just need time to reconcile those opposing feelings before I feel like going back out to Sea.  I’m pretty sure Odysseus was content to stay on shore for at least a while after he finally made it home.  I know I am.  I have my House to finish decorating with my emotional “trunks” and different Parts of Myself to get to know.  I’m on a different odyssey now, still an inner one, but on a different level.  I wonder what I’ll discover this time.