Based on a friend's recommendation, I checked out Stephenson Bond's (1993) book, Living Myth: Personal Meaning as a Way of Life, from the library of the C. G. Jung Society of Seattle where I volunteer. I didn't get far. After reading "to encounter the living process of otherness in your own subjective experience" is like discovering an alien within (p. 24), I stopped. An image I painted a few years ago of a raft inside a boat unexpectedly popped into my head for no apparent reason. Usually when something like this happens, the random thought disappears before I can catch it. But this time it didn't get away and I had already painted it.
Actually, I’ve managed to record two dreams of boats inside boats. The image above is based on the first dream that came in early January 2020 and went like this:
1/20/20. I'm on a raft on a lake inside a sailboat. To prepare for rough weather, the sailboat sails out of the harbor and into the open ocean. (It’s safer to be out on the open ocean than in the harbor.) The seas become very rough, but I tie my raft to a dock on the inner lake. A man standing on the dock explains to me that the sailboat is alive and has two gigantic kidneys, one red and one green. When the seas are rough like this, the kidneys work very hard. He warns me to be careful around them and to not touch or blow on them. He has miniature copies of the kidneys in his hands. Each kidney is a network of vessels twisted into a ball. One is smaller than the other.
In September, 2022, I had another boat within a boat dream:
I'm standing on a deck inside a large steamship with a pool in its hull. Another boat, the size of a semi-truck (!) is in the pool sinking. This boat belongs to a man I know who’s on the deck with me. I worry the inner boat won’t fit in the pool as it goes down and that it will somehow bring the big boat down too. I ask the man to measure his boat and make sure it fits. If it's too big, we may have to ask other boats to follow us, in case we need help.
In the same section of Living Myth where Bond writes about encountering an alien, he discusses two kinds of objective reality: an outer ‘real’ one, and a psychological inner elusive one. Jung named psychic objective reality the collective unconscious or, as I prefer, the objective psyche. Historically, organized religion provided access to the inner objective world, but it can also be a moving personal experience that simultaneously feels impossibly strange.
Continuing with aliens, when I left veterinary surgery in 2017 I felt alien to myself. Rather than encountering an alien, I was the alien. I had been swallowed by a whale! However, in time my eyes adjusted to the light. I noticed wooden struts and discovered the whale was not a whale after all, but the great ribs of an ocean sailing vessel. Separation between myself and the alien had begun.
Through exploring the connection between the Bond, the alien, and the boat, I've come to understand that the boat dreams are images the objective psyche as an experience.
Jung has a beautiful quote that describes his experience of the collective unconscious that masquerades as something small but becomes overwhelming, which in turn forces us to begin to know ourselves. Jung writes:
No, the collective unconscious is anything but an incapsulated personal system; it is sheer objectivity, as wide as the world and open to all the world. There I am the object of every subject, in complete reversal of my ordinary consciousness, where I am always the subject that has an object. There I am utterly one with the world, so much a part of it that I forget all too easily who I really am. “Lost in oneself” is a good way of describing this state. But this self is the world, if only a consciousness could see it. That is why we must know who we are. (Jung, CW 9i, par. 46)
After surviving the belly of the whale, and many storms at sea, I don’t yet know where the steamship is sailing, or whether the sinking boat will fit, but I suspect I’m on a path where there’s no choice but to find out. And I’m more than okay with that.
References
Jung, C.G. (1968). Archetypes of the collective unconscious (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). In H. Read et al. (Eds.), The collected works of C. G. Jung (Vol. 9 pt. 1, 2nd ed., pp. 3-41). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1954)
Bond, D. S. (1993). Living myth: Personal meaning as a way of life. Shambala Publications.
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