Join me on a journey. The following narrative and visualizations are a blending of several trance journeys I have taken through my subconscious in recent months.

—–

Laying on my back, floating on the surface of a body of water, I am aware of a gentle breeze that speaks through the leaves and branches of the trees on the shore, a shore occupied by calm and welcoming forests and meadows. Leaves representing my thoughts gently fall from the trees. Some of them hit the water and disappear beneath the surface. Some touch the surface ever so briefly, before they are snatched back into the air and whisked away. Others dance away on the gentle wind, never touching the water.

Above, the sky is dotted with clouds representing my emotions and reflections, gentle white clouds softly moving across the sky, or materializing out of the aether only to dissolve away once more to nothing. Some days the clouds are dark or tempestuous, but today they are soft and light.

The leaves that fall on the surface of the water have more impact and substance than the clouds. Some enter my subconscious and are internalized, while others blow away on the wind. Some of the clouds cast shadows on the water, shadows that fall down into the depths and create reactions in that which dwells within the light’s reach.

As I slowly breathe in and out, I observe the movements of the clouds and the leaves without judgement. They are as they need to be right now. I do not need to change them, for they naturally change as I change, as my thoughts change, as my experiences change.

The clouds become fewer and the leaves fall more slowly. My surface thoughts are still there, seen in the movements of those clouds and leaves, but I pay them less and less mind as I enter a trance state.

The lake seems quiet, but there are gentle currents, mostly moving up and down in an eternal exchange. Downward currents pull thoughts and ideas and experiences into the depths of the subconscious where they will be remembered and processed. Bubbling currents moving upward to the surface bring memories of experiences and thoughts and ideas back to the conscious mind, transformed from how they were when they entered.

I float there for a time, feeling the currents pushing up and pulling down, a neverending and essential exchange, balanced in the liminal space between conscious and subconscious.

I watch the clouds and the leaves as they slow down and move on.

I breath, slowly, deeply.

I feel myself start to sink. I welcome it with a loving smile, for all that is below the surface is me. My subconscious is as much me as the conscious thoughts, maybe even more so. I do not shrink from it, for to explore here, to know what is to be found, so I may better understand myself and heal myself, is the greatest act of self-love I have ever engaged in.

I turn my head downward and let the currents pull me where they will. There is still light here, dancing through the water to feed the aquatic plants, thriving and vibrant. These are the parts of me that are close at hand, easy to reach and access, friendly and easily known.

The leaves of the plants cradle me for a time, where I can still see the surface far up above. I can see the leaves from the trees still gently hitting the surface and sending out ripples that shift the light. I can see the mottled shadows of the drifting clouds cast upon the surface.

I am aware of altars in this space, artifacts of past and present grief, evidence of the love I still hold for those which are physically gone from my life. I float among the plants and observe those altars of solace and peace, to give space for grief, love, and memory.

I feel a pull and let myself sink further down, as a gentle loving weight carries me onward.

The light from the surface fades as the thick, lush, green plants turn to roots and brambles. I have passed down so far that I am barely aware of the surface far above. I cannot see it. That which dwells here hides and shifts and moves in ways that can cause damage or send poison with the currents up to the surface.

There be monsters here.

The anxieties I face, old and new. They dwell here. Phobias, fears, grudges, jealousies, these things all exist in these spaces, internalized from experiences up above, or growing out of that which is further down.

I know them well.

I can feel them more than see them, moving around through the darkness, with their teeth and claws and powerful muscles.

Their power is real, but so is mine. Knowing them, understanding them, removes the power of mystery. It allows me mastery. I am calmly relaxed, though I must always be wary of overconfidence. It is when I ignore them and fail to give them their due respect that they can still bite and sting and poison.

There may not be as many of them as there used to be, and their forms have changed over the years, but there will always be something here. There is always something here.

They gesture at me, they make their presence known, but they do not approach. I know they will not approach. There is no reason they would. I am not here to see them. I have other business today.

The darkness deepens, yet I can still see. The monsters are different even further down. They are larger and move more slowly. Some are friends. Some I am still getting to know. Some I will never fully comprehend, for here I find the foundations of my experiences in life. Here I find cultural conditioning and traumas from childhood, big things that hold and spawn so much of what is found above.

Some glow softly in the darkness as I sink yet further down. Some take note of me, but most simply exist and pay me no mind. My conscious mind is always moving. It bothers them not, even when I would very much like for them to move so I can process and heal and change my foundations for the better.

But today is not the day for them, either. No. My destination lays still further down in the depths.

The looming awareness of monsters and lumbering foundations fades in the blackness, for now they are all above me.

The space around me seems quiet, almost undisturbed. I feel almost no currents, no movement, no presence, only darkness.

And yet I sink further still, in a vast nothingness that is yet somehow very much something.

I feel like I should be scared, and yet I am not.

A gentle peace and loving tranquility passes over me.

My feet ever so gently touch bottom, effortlessly, like I had done it a million times before.

The ground feels sandy, soft enough I sink into it ever so slightly, but smooth, with only very gentle undulations in the surface level. The water is warm and buoyant, and so very, very dark.

I realize that I feel at peace because there is nothing to fear here. There is nothing here that could ever cause me fear or worry or sadness. Those things are all above, created by life experiences. They are so far above me that I can only barely perceive them, as distant and unimportant as the surface became when swimming with the monsters.

There is something here, though.

Me.

There is nothing to fear because all that is here, at the very core of my subconscious, is that which is fundamentally me. It is not my life experiences, my traumas, my joys, my heartbreaks. It is my soul, the spark that is uniquely me, complete in itself before I took my first breath, before I felt my first pain and first pleasure. This is where I find the truth, the core, the heart of me, that which most informs how I uniquely respond to those life experiences dwelling so far up above.

Monsters cannot swim so deep. They cannot dwell here, for they are additions. They are foundational, but they are not fundamental. Foundations can be changed. The fundamental nature of who I am cannot be changed.

I am.

And so I found myself.

And out of that blackness I saw light, like bioluminescence. The blackness was not empty at all. It was teeming with beautiful things, some small, some large, some fast, some slow, each moving in their own unique way, dancing with lights of all colors and more.

And I smiled.

It was amazing.

And so I swam with myself for a time, weeping for the rich complexity of my fundamental nature, overcome with joy for truly understanding how much influence my true self has on my conscious self, despite childhood trauma and abuse, despite cultural conditioning and societal expectations. It can be hard to know who you are under such things, especially since I never had a chance to be carefree and explore who I was as a small child. All my conscious life I have lived with trauma response. That robbed me of any potential benchmarks I might have used to more easily understand where my true self ended and trauma response began.

As beautiful as it was, I could not stay there forever. The conscious and subconscious minds each play important rolls in how human psychology works, so the conscious mind can only come down for visits.

I happily embraced the loving experience of seeing the deepest, truest part of me, and allowed myself to be pulled back up towards the surface.

The bubbling current carried me up through my subconscious, past the bioluminescence of Me, past the lumbering behemoths of my foundational beliefs and experiences, past all the monsters, past the roots and altars and plants. The light danced upon me, calling me effortlessly upward, as the shapes of the trees and clouds became more and more solid.

Once again, I found myself floating on the surface of a body of water, breathing for a minute within the space that is neither conscious nor subconscious. On the shores I could see forests and meadows, with leaves gently blowing on the wind, sometimes hitting the surface and sinking down into the depths. Up in the sky I could see the sparse clouds drifting across the blue expanse.

Except now the clouds become more populous, and the leaves fell in larger numbers.

The profound knowledge started to fade, for the conscious mind cannot hold onto such things, yet I retained a visceral awareness of how it felt to be in that space, how secure and loved I am, how grateful I am to be me.

And I exit the trance state.

Once more, fully in my conscious mind.