Dreaming of Being “At Sea”

The dream is not unusual, and seemed on topic and in winter with me wandering, looking for bottom lines, paragraphs to capture my canter, and organize words and phrases that are hanging fire like some subject/object line waiting for a teacher to deliver a benediction of sorts, all the while reminding me of a lost profession.

I continue to wander through the dream space, searching for something more substantial, perhaps a tree limb bearing words and phrases that this English major is able to decipher and bring to the attention of the class, “a dangling participle” that hangs cheekily between a “subject/object” order that has held nations together and kept dangerous “interjections” to a minimum.

The dream moves on and I seem to be at a boat landing, spraying scraps of grammar in miniature on waiting ships getting ready for an adventurous trip to nowhere. The woman at the helm, perhaps waiting for a “far right rudder” order, looked like a Dr. Lukas, my undergraduate English teacher. All of a sudden, I seem to have a heroine at the ready, with navigation charts thick with magic marker lines that highlighted navigation courses in the Pacific Ocean. The deck log was nearby, clearly waiting for my advice and salutations.

In this regard I didn’t seem to have much to say. After all, I wasn’t the captain or the Officer of the Deck (OOD); just a dream-fed, 2nd Class Petty Officer wandering around the navigation bridge looking for company. Then something happened and the ship got underway, and I could immediately hear the 2,000 lb. bombs creaking in the forward holds. I remembered the ship’s name, the USS Mount Baker AE4 and we were on our way to Vietnam to deliver bombs to the Seventh Fleet operating in the vicinity.

I heard a few announcements over the 1MC, the shipboard public address system, including: “Loose lips sink ships,” a reminder that sharing information about the ship’s location, destination and objectives was strictly forbidden. With that declaration that dream narrative seemed to end with a familiar announcement, “Attention on Deck,” a familiar command when someone or something of note was brought to the crew’s attention.

The dream fades and I have a sense of being “at sea,” such as the time my ship was caught in the middle of a typhoon in the Western Pacific, losing all power and navigation. I will never forget the bombs rolling around in the hold. The crew could do nothing but throw out bedding between the bombs, slowing down the trajectory and the damage. That dream scene woke me, perhaps because the trauma has never been completely resolved.

On waking, I’m not surprised that I dream of my Navy experience. It was one of the most memorable experiences of my life. In some respects, the sea has informed my existence, my psychology, fiction and poetry for much my adult life. My first published poem, “That Kingdom Coming Business” (The Sewanee Review), explored the relation between the religious and martial aspects of war. My novel, “USS Bunker Kills: A Sea Story,” is an historical coming-of-age novel about a British immigrant who joins the US Navy during the height of the Vietnam war. The dream explored in this piece underscores the numbing presence of war in the psyche.

I have studied the psychology of Carl Jung at the CG Jung Foundation in NYC for more than twenty years and tried to apply that knowledge to other words of fiction. My soon-to-be-released work, “When War Becomes Us,” is a novel about armed conflict on the ground, at sea, and in the psyche. It is about how we remember, forget and recast wars by creating stories, fictions and other narrative veils in our search for wholeness. The novel explores the psychology of such an enterprise.

My other upcoming novel, “Going Under: The Wound, the Dream, and the Prayer,” is a movement away from the sea, inwards toward the psyche. Much of the action is backwards and down into memories, dreams, and reflections of the main character. The more than eighty actual dreams I experienced while researching and writing the book, are an integral part of the narrative and psychology of the work, that perhaps Jung, if he was being overly kind, might call a coming into consciousness and a soulful wholeness of love, forbearance and grace. This psychological path eventually “wakes” the protagonist to the feminine and anima self that he has not fully understood.

I am blessed with my introduction to Jung and the hundreds of dreams I’ve had to help me transition from a martial to a more soulful perspective. War seems to still show up my night-door, regularly, but is tempered by a Jungian perspective and the appreciation of anima’s role in the psyche. There is a distancing.

But, given that the psyche is unpredictable and hardly linear in story line, I’ll close with this. A few days ago, I dreamt I was drifting through space, holding my breath when my doctor’s signal flag, sporting images of a sextant and compass, came down, close to my face, and it felt like I was back on the deck of a Navy ship taking in and spitting out commands. The universe seems to gather an angel or two and a clerk counting the number of waves “gifted” by a following sea while a visible planet Venus continues to demand attention by regularly changing her arc.

I now find myself below deck chanting words like Hector, Neptune, and Delta, looking for something with unworldly muscle to silence the noise in my head, the ache in my heart that has come from meridians on my dream map separated by change and angry sea, family scattered along the meridians of my life, and all palliatives from the doctor’s bottle falling short.

My task now is to look for those “underwater,” who lack mooring and purpose. I begin my swim through a series of Mercator lines, presenting a spherical earth. This is great practice for the sailor but not so much for the on-land crowd. The dream seems to know I am looking for another path, and vow that I will swim through all the colors of the rainbow, searching for lost souls, until, as my mother might say, “Til the cows come home.”

I woke sensing my psyche had the language, syntax, and “at sea” context of the dream just about right. I am reminded that dream work is essentially a journey into the psyche. Having a mother show up during the proceeding, is always a blessing, a tonic for an often dominant “at sea” position.

The sea seems to have been the perfect archetype for showing me the sinuous, often daunting and richly disturbing way home.