Voyage

In general, the dream journey is a comment on what is happening in your life, and how you feel about it. It may also relate to undertakings you embark on; new experiences or ways of life you are entering. You can go on the journey of life, a spiritual journey, the journey into marriage, parenthood, etc. The journey cannot be undertaken unless you are willing to travel, to move from one experience, one attitude or way of life to another. So sometimes you meet hesitations or things to do before you can go.

A new undertaking or a relationship or way of life or sometimes it is the voyage of self-discovery into your inner life. See Travel; Archetype of the Night Journey; Archetype of the Search for Self

Throughout history we have examples of how such inner journeys were lived out. Mohammed for instance, describes his massive breakthrough into what he felt was a cosmic revelation as The Night Journey, which occurred in a dream. Siddhartha, after years of discipline and privation, finds a new way of experiencing life in what we now call the experience of enlightenment, and became the Buddha. Jesus transformed into the Christ at baptism through an opening to a new type of awareness. Thousands of people in today’s world have followed in the footsteps of those early pioneers and experienced for themselves the meeting with what Jung calls The Self – the emergence into an experience of greater wholeness or completeness; the falling away of the defences, resistances and fears that have held us back from our fullest and most profound experience of ourselves; an experience of enlightenment. It is not a case of developing an attribute we didn’t already have, but of bursting through the personal or culturally imposed barriers that have walled off this greater expanse of self from easy access. See Enlightenment

A journey at sea cuts us off from our usual activities. It puts us in closer and inescapable contact with fellow travellers. It also offers the possibility of missing the boat, something that may be irreversible. This all points to how we are always in the midst of enormous natural forces, times and tides of activity. Your sea dreams will indicate your relationship with this.

A dreamt of journey often shows how we are feeling about our life and its ups and downs, goals and destinations, challenges and opportunities. It also can define undertakings we embark on, or experiences being met. The overall tone of our life is may be depicted by the dream journey and the direction our unconscious is taking us and our life and what it is achieving.

In our life we have lots of journeys, such as that through schooling; marriage and perhaps divorce; work; parenthood; and the overall journey of life and death.

In a similar way people have remembered their life from conception on, a life of tremendous change and wonder, a life of amazing transformations from a vegetative state of simple cell growth, into basic life such as a fish – for we go through a phase in which we have gills – and from that we pass slowly into a creature that is capable of life out of the water. In fact, we still carry the evidence in our body. See Levels of the Brain

Such journeys are all forgotten for most of us, and yet we are the result of them – perhaps unconsciously. But there are countless other journeys we have usually forgotten, for we are the latest stretch of a journey that is as old as life on this earth, and even older if present scientific discoveries are true. There has never ever been a break in the line of life that started in the beginning of life in an ancient sea. Some people remember it, see Jesse Watkins Enlightenment

We tend to name them past lives but could be better thought of as forgotten journeys. For example, a single cell, which is a seed from which all life forms evolved from, doesn’t become old or die because it is immortal, for it keeps dividing and doesn’t die. In dividing it constantly creates copies of itself, but as it does so it gathers new experience, it changes what is copied, so becomes the ‘seed’ for multi-cellular organism. We all started from the original one cell, and we, you and I are the result of gathered experience.

No plant or creature grows from a dead seed, and each living seed carries within it all the past gathered from all its forebears. So, the seed in your mother’s womb is as old as and even older than humankind, and you carry that wisdom or memories in you. But in this life, you developed a new brain, and the memories, education and programming you gathered this time are what you built your personality from, but beneath that is a very ancient self. To explore it see Opening to Life

Forgotten journeys: We have been on a long series of journeys, and the series make up our present life, or at least underlie it. For instance, most people cannot remember their birth – yet that was an important and often dramatic life journey. Yet thousands of people have recovered such memories, often because they were able to face the enormity of their emotions – as a baby you could not think and so all you had was feelings and instinctive responses. See Programmed

Interrupted or difficult journey: Expresses difficulties and anxieties of present life situation; symbol of the psychological journey of self-realisation.

Useful Questions and Hints:

What sort of journey was it – walking, but, train, bicycle, car or plane, or even space flight?

Were they difficulties on the way?

Did you reach your goal?

See: Where applicable day and night, for time of journey; car; train; boat; hill; aeroplane. Also it is important to see individuation; Travelling; Boat; Journey; Archetype of the Night Journey; Journey Through The Mind ; Journeying Beyond Dreams and Death; Journey Inwards.