Missing Large Chunk of HD Space

Hello all, have a question. I tried searching around for an answer, but only managed to become more unsure of things. Some basic info about my Mac:
Macbook Pro, 15 inch (early 2011)
8 GB RAM
OS X Lion 10.7.5 (It originally came with the version before this; I upgraded)
2.2 GHz Intel Core i7
To start, here is a picture:
As we can see here, I have a 697 GB HD. The scan shows in the lower left that the files, including all Applications, currently are occupying 357 GB. If we look to the right side, we can see that I have "Miscellaneous Used Space: 231 GB". So even adding these two numbers, we only get to 588 GB total. 697-588 is 109 GB, but I'm assuming that's the size of the OS.
So my question is, where is my missing 231 GB and how can I use it to store additional files? In my searches I found out about VM, and here's a screenshot of my Activity Monitor:
So this shows a VM size of 222 GB, which is roughly, the amount missing (588-222=368). I have no applications open except Firefox and Activity Monitor. Everything else in the Activity Monitor are things that are fractions of percentage points; they add up to nothing large.
I have only 123 GB of available drive space according to Finder. So if we take that away from the VM, it's still sapping 100 GB. So my question is, what is this VM, and how can I get it back?
I tried reading other topics about it, but they were vague and not very helpful. If anyone can enlighten me, I'd appreciate it.

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A disassembled and labeled 1997 hard drive. All major components were placed on a mirror, which created the symmetrical reflections.
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1,000,000,000 KB (Kilobytes) 1,000,000,000 * 1000 B 976,562,500 KiB (Kibibytes) 976,562,500 * 1024 B
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BNK12 wrote:
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