The Belly of the Whale: A Descent

How a forgotten dream gave me the courage to face this important stage in transformation

Jul 24, 2024

Last September, I had the strangest dream. That’s nothing new—I have wild dreams all the time. They bring me comfort, and I use them as a vehicle to better understand my day-to-day life. But this one stumped me.

Anyway, time passed, and I forgot about it.

Until today.

So what was my dream?

Photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash

I am tasked to care for a recently released prisoner. We walk around the top floor of a shopping complex past racks of garish garments that look like clothes that Alice in Wonderland would wear. The man isn’t able to work out how to use an escalator.. Suddenly, I am in a body of water, then thrust under a rock shelf, scrabbling for the surface. I calm down and realised I can breathe underwater. I take in my surroundings and seem to be in an underground cavern. A woman sits opposite me with her head in her hands. She says, "Welcome to the belly of the whale."

I ask how long has she been in here, “Six months,” she says.

Six months? So long? I have places to be. I look up and wonder if I can climb out of the whale’s spout?

I wake.

Today, I planned to write about an important stage of many narrative arcs: the descent.

From a narrative perspective, only a heroine’s journey involves a descent, more often than not involving a literal vertical drop into an underworld. Unlike the hero’s journey, which often skips over this dark night of the soul, descent is an integral part of a heroine’s journey arc as well as a healer’s journey.

Like in stories, catalytic events occur to every one of us. Illness, injury, loss, death, changes in career, divorce, birth, menopause are all inciting incidents in our lives. For those running their own business, there are similar moments that can send the business into a tailspin (the pandemic was a global example of such a trajectory). For some this incident tilts their world on an axis. For most, life is never the same.

In the therapy world, particularly in the Jungian modality, a descent parallels the process of shadow work. For those societies who lean into spiritual development, they inherently understand this is about evolving as a human, something all of us are called to do. But for us in individualistic societies a descent will have us pounding on the therapist’s door begging to make it stop at any cost. Yes to come face to face with our shadow self and look that beast right in the eye is confrontational and never fun (like never), but with the right therapist, we can learn to integrate various parts of the psyche and develop as human beings. Honestly we can.

“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it…. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind.”

– Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

When I had my second child late in life, struggling with obstetric violence and a traumatic birth injury, my sense of self was obliterated. I misplaced it daily under a mountain of laundry and nappies like a stone in a pond, I sunk into a descent. It took months, a lot of talk talk therapy but I ascended once more, transformed. Then, not long afterward menopause slunk in and tossed me me right back down into the shit soup.

But here’s the rub. Down there in the underworld (or in the shit soup) there are others. Should we know how to look for them, we can find community.

We can connect, and unite, rising in one networked transformed beast of our own making.

Today, I experienced a timely moment of synchronicity. After spending the morning writing this piece, I closed my laptop and drove the dog to a scheduled vet appointment. As I always do, I threw on a podcast, selecting a random episode of This Jungian Life, one of my favorite shows. The end of each episode is dedicated to the analysis of a listener’s dream. They mentioned a 53-year-old psychotherapist and storyteller, and I thought, ‘That lady is one year younger than me.’ Then I realised they were working on a dream I had submitted last year. Soon, they isolated a theme of my dream, and it was - you guessed it - descent. You can listen to or watch this episode here.

My seemingly random act of listening to a podcast about descent on the very same morning I am writing about the subject is more than a coincidence. To me it is a timely reminder of how life will turn up for us when we are open to it.

Whether you are a writer, an artist, someone on your journey to healing, or even at

the helm of your own business, I encourage you to embrace your descent. and SHARE your lived experience for this lays a roadmap and teaches others to not shun such an important part in the transformation process. Because descent will clobber us when we least expect it; we can’t free up chunks of time in our diaries or train in preparation because she is a shape-shifting entity, taking the form of any number of inciting incidents. For the most part we are dragged down, kicking and screaming as i certainly was (many times). But if we can breathe, take stock, look around and surrender to what is, we may discover this process hasn’t killed us but it has done something far more profound-it has changed our cellular makeup. And we have no choice but to keep

breathing in and breathing out and just live on, not with the life we thought we would have, but with the one destiny had in store all along (yes i know, what a bitch, but we’re helpless to change it so we may as well just keep on keeping on)

Why? Well consider

this- Philosopher and poet Jean Gebser describes five versions of consciousness: archaic, magical, mythical, mental, and integral. As a society, we hold mental consciousness above all else. We are logical, our science rooted in empirical proof. it means something, right? But it’s a false ceiling becaude the cost is to deny myth and story, for they are not ‘fact’.

How few of us feel our feet on the ground?

We live in buildings and wear shoes that separate us from the earth. We are ungrounded and we laud the old adage, “I think, therefore I am.” Is it any surprise there is so much anxiety and depression, or that education systems bound by this style of consciousness is bowing under the weight of a legion of neurodiversity diagnoses they have no means to handle.

A colleague works as an educator of young people, taking them into the wild. He recently said that he sees a theme with the kids who struggle the most in school, “those who aren’t able to sit still,’ who are seeen as disruptive in the classroom. But his eyes light up as he says, “put a spear in their hand and take them bush and these kids are like god-damn ninjas.”

So lets return to my dream that took almost a year and this podcast analysis to unspool thst I was being called into another descent. My psyche was telling me to literally get off the top floor, out of my head and access my spiritual-magical self. I see now what was being asked was threefold: to surrender to what is, to relinquish my self imposed timetable and bow down before fate and honour her.

I think of the woman who had sat in the the belly of the whale with her head in her hands for six months and marvel how a part of my psyche could know that less than two weeks after having this dream I would slip on a rock-shelf just like the one I dreamed of- and shatter my wrist. It would take six months before it was able to function in any way. Six months in the belly of that beast to think about all this.