Dreamstories

I will teach a writing course starting next weekend. (https://www.jungarchademy.com/dream-story) My students and I will explore the narrative structure of dreams and fairytales. The intention is to teach, learn, and practice the art of turning dreams into enduring and universal stories. Engaging stories that can be shared around campfires, on long car trips, before bedtime. There is a deep and enduring current to our lives that flows to the same eternal sea. This current is archetypal, as in, arch-a-typical. What I mean by this is something familiar and universal can be glimpsed and mined in our personal story and find its place in the bigger Story. The story is enfolded in the Story. Like Matryoshka dolls. Knowing this is both a comfort and a call. It frames our little lives in the mythic.

We often get so caught up in the personal story. We forge an identity and oftentimes wear it like a turtle wears its shell. Yet, this identity is no more than, at its best, a calling card. At its worst, a defence. Psychologist would call it our persona. A mask or costume we wear to meet the world. The squishy, soft, vulnerable part hidden behind or inside the shell is infinitely more interesting. My hope in the writing course I will offer, is that we will find the skill and the courage to reveal some of the Self behind the mask. Some of the universal or even eternal behind the personal or mortal. Might this mediate some of the victim over-identification prevalent in our culture? Might this reawaken what is noble in us?

I have said before that we are made of scars and stars. Our dreams remind us of the scars, even of the wounds. The wonder we seek lies in the wounds we seek to avoid. Yet, if we can tap these personal stories, sound their depths, a rhythm of the greater story vibrates. At least that is my thesis. We are part of a much larger narrative. Alas, too often we read the headlines of our lives and ignore the full article. Some of us fear to even open the book cover. Or, some of us read the first or second chapter and believe this is the whole story. Some of us surrender authorship. The whole story of our lives as individuals and as human beings is being written with each breath, each dream, each act of courage we muster to honestly face the mystery. We are made of scars and stars. We are made of wounds and wonders.

Did you know that the fairytale Rumpelstiltskin is said to be about 10,000 years old. I can hardly wrap my head around that. I have no idea how ‘they’ determine the age of a tale. Carbon dating? MRI scans? For ten thousand years, ten thousand cycles, ten thousand births and deaths, the universal proclivity to spin straw into gold has been part of our experience. Ancients and moderns have unwittingly promised parts of ourselves in exchange for the lustre of the metal. Exchanged the future for the gratification of the present. This pattern is older than the pyramids, older than the Parthenon, and certainly older than the cathedrals of Europe. Troubadours, story keepers, and dream weavers have been trying to learn the secret name of things since Adam forfeited this responsibility. It seems that when we know the secret name of things, we have the capacity to save what is worth saving. Build an ark. Save the seeds. It is these silver seeds that are then carried across the swollen rivers of chaos. Few of us sit before a spinning wheel beneath a mountain of straw, but many of us know all too well the dwarfing attitudes and behaviours that hold us hostage. Many of us learn, often the hard way, what and who tricks us into servitude and demands our lifeblood. The TikTok ban is pending. The inauguration of a new term is looming and set to dominate the legacy media reels. Potential and current regimes are rising and falling. The secret names of deep things are whispering within the cacophony. Are we listening? Or are we caught in the spin? Turning and turning in the ever widening gyre…

Was what we know as the Rumpelstiltskin tale once someone’s dream? I posit, yes. I think the unconscious told a story to an ancient dreamer to try to shift an old or develop a new conscious attitude. The dreamstory was such a compelling one that the dreamer told and retold the story. It went viral. It shifted and changed over time and the personal details were eventually swallowed up by the universal patterns. The tale hit a secret chord in the development of humanity and the archetypal Story became greater than even the identity of the original dreamer. Once there was a miller… Once there was an old King… Once there was a dumbling… Our enduring stories capture the and articulate the universal patterns manifesting in the human condition. Rumpelstiltskin told our story. And it still does.. It is still telling our Story. For ten thousand years. It now lives in the ancestral proteins of our DNA. Do genes become memes? Is this cultural epigenetics?

Once upon a time there was an ancient dreamer who was awakened by a dream and given a psychological task. A story was told to him in his dreaming and it woke him to a deeper mystery within. The dreamer was tasked with a soul mandate to learn the secret name of things. To look beneath the surface. Part of this ancient dreamer, like most of us, wanted to stay unconscious. Part of the ancient dreamer wanted to claim and control the secrets and keep things familiar. Part of him or her wanted to retreat into a shell and protect the squishy parts. Part if this dreamer stomped his or her foot and the emergent wisdom disappeared into the unconscious. It did not die. These things never do. It simply went unconscious for a while to try again in another time, in another psyche, at another epoch.

'Today I'll bake, tomorrow I'll brew, The next I’ll fetch the queen's new child; Still no one knows it just the same, That Rumpelstiltskin is my name.

Something in this dreamstory began to live in the dreamscape. Each time the story was told, heard, retold, the protective shell enfolding the wisdom became softer and the dreamer grew in consciousness. The story became a Story. The listeners could find themselves in the Story. Then and now. Ancient and modern people know all about the innocent Princess. The braggart Father. The indentured Queen. The greedy King. The Charlatan. The promised Child. The outrage of the ugly Dwarf. This Story lives in us still. It lives in the story of how we treat our beloved earth. In the story of how we spin and fret away our precious time. In the story of clandestine deals and vulgar promises. In the story of our secrets. In the story of how we are tricked until we discover the trickster hidden but ever-present. The TikTok ban is pending. The inauguration of a new term is looming and set to dominate the legacy media reels. Potential and current regimes are rising and falling. The secret names of deep things, deep wisdom is whispering within the cacophony.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming