Sorry for the late reply,

This dream and your interpretation once again speak to a degree of accuracy in my life that I have to accept. I do not have a good attitude about life overall and tend to stay stuck in the same bad habits. In my head I have a sense of who my ideal self is, but in reality I tend to be anxious, negative, and cannot keep a good thing going. I drink too much and stay stuck in a negative state of mind that I cannot seem to get out of. But, that is why I am here and in a few other places, trying to move forward in life.

Age & Gender & Location {Required}: 29 Male Virginia

Riffing some on the other interpretation, and having stumbled upon this by chance and intrigue:
Consider the larger boat as the norms of society (superego); the ocean as vastness & depth, what you fear but also what you need, all the things you can never suppress or forget, what you'll eventually have to face and integrate into your whole being, and what holds you up, what feeds you. It contains threats here. I agree with much of the above.
What you were raised (from birth - from the ocean) to trust and rely upon and have faith in is crumbling, no longer provides for you. The smaller boat represents what I'll call your ego, but I mean the part of you that carries those taught ideas and fears, protects you from the unknown and the vastness, and tells you what to believe and what's acceptable and what's not. Returning to the wreck in the smaller boat is like turning on the news for comfort after a traumatic event, trying to return to an earlier time before everything changed, trying to be a good consumer to forget the peril we're in as a planet right now.
Being in the water was your act of amazing courage. The words you said or heard "you know you're in the dark when you see yourself glow" are pure grace. You can go below. You (or Christian Bale*) can go through the whale, be devoured and transformed, but not destroyed. At the very least, you would join that whale. Look again - did you see a movie where you related to that actor's character?

Usually I find that my dream symbols are pretty esoteric and can be fairly obvious to me but nobody else might guess them, but I just found one more glaring thing:
Christian and Bail. What does Christian mean to you? Was that a the ship of your youth? To bail is to save a ship, but that ceased to be an option. Maybe your unconscious is telling you your christian faith is no longer going to bail you out and you have to figure out how to generate enough light from yourself to start a fire on that island. Who cut and stacked the wood?
I think any crisis of faith and questioning is a good thing. It can hurt, but if you follow that it will lead to deeper truth and meaning. I'm not religious, by the way.

Age & Gender & Location {Required}: 40 M US

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