Today I am sitting at my desk and (day)dreaming and I’m thinking back to a time when I was grabbed by something, it was an exciting driven time. I was looking to live something greater than the mundane everyday, as well as seeking greater psychological accord. Whatever the question was myth underscored the answer. By myth I mean a timeless and essential expression of being in the world.
Exploring the mythical allows for profound meaning. The discovery of meaning at a deep psychological level is sense-making. I was carried by my passion for learning and subsequently wrote a dissertation on myth. For a long while Joseph Campbell was my hero, while I undertook my own hero’s journey through difficult times. He said that in today’s world all meaning is individual “… there the meaning is absolutely unconscious. One does not know toward what one moves. One does not know by what one is propelled. The lines of communication between the conscious and the unconscious zones of the human psyche have all been cut, and we have been split in two.” I was searching for meaning, or to put it simply, I was looking for me. I haven’t stopped looking, there is no endpoint to self awareness just growing and going.
I want to know what I do not know. I try to bring my dreaming into the everyday world, it brings colour and wonder while facilitating the integration of many experiences – social, natural,business and academic – into a coherent whole.
Carl G. Jung saw dreams as a window into something less known about ourselves, our secondary processes, or the things about ourselves that we are less aware of. Dreams as windows is a heady sort of thought, as windows can most often be seen through. Jung was most interested in dreams we dreamed as children and later narrated as adults. There is something meaningful in these early dreams that persist in our lives.
A simple way to try and elicit meaning from a dream look upwards and gaze at the ceiling, or step outside and look to the firmament, and ask: Why did the universe send me this dream? Perhaps there is an indication of some pattern or path.
A personal myth is a dream structure that organises one’s life. Threads and fabric of this myth are most often found in dreams and earliest memories from childhood, revealing something of our psychological inheritance. Think of these remembered images as the psychological equivalent of our biological genes. That is such an intriguing idea.
Exploring your dreams and myth encourage self-discovery and provides the opportunity for greater psychological accord. Feelings of congruence are achieved through understanding and then aligning one’s actions, reactions or responses with the deeper behavioural tendencies that prevail. An individual’s tendencies are like the motifs in the patterns of our being and determine the directions of our relationships. The less conscious the tendencies, the less harmonious our actions and behaviours might be and the less meaningful our direction seems. Myth work is endowed with a revelatory potential, providing illumination to patterns, paths, and directions, all of which can become more conscious and intentional making our existence more purposeful. If you move and make decisions that align with your myth you’ll experience a sense of ease, effortlessness, and happiness. Even if, like this quote from Riddley Walker, “Our woal life is a idear we dint think of nor we don’t know what it is….”
It is possible that working on your own childhood dream and other memories can help locate yourself within the vastness of the world of possibilities. Finding myth brings a connection to the joy of being who we are as ‘me’.
There is much I will never know, can not know, and there is something inestimably valuable about being able to bring dreaming into my everyday. From time to time I conduct workshops to explore personal myth – I put them up on the Projects tab of this website.