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There are cultural, ethnic, institutional, and personal myths, among others. Rather than judged as "true" or "false" myths can be evaluated as functional or dysfunctional in regard to growth, development and the attaining of goals set by a group or an individual. Dreams appear to synthesize the dreamer's existing mythic structures with the information gleaned from life experience. Personal myths seem to develop in a manner that is parallel to the way dreams develop because they are related to the brain's propensity for language, imagery and story-telling. These are the raw materials for myth and I believe that dreams play an active role in the ongoing revision of the dreamer's personal mythology. After listening to my seminar participants use dreams to discover their personal myths, I tabulated the themes that appeared most frequently. Curiously, these themes appeared in pairs of polar opposites, often within the same dream. Some dreams---and personal myths---centered around achievement, while others centered on deprivation. Other polarities were creation and destruction, completion and fragmentation, affirmation and cynicism, acceptance and rejection, empowerment and debilitation, reconciliation and alienation, wisdom and ignorance, loyalty and betrayal, intimacy and separation, questing and passivity, death and rebirth. To cite Rollo May, "Dreaming has some connection with man's distinctive capacity for transcendence, i.e. his capacity to break through the immediate objective limits of existence and bring together into one dramatic union diverse dimensions of experience." Click here for a description of the Seven Day Dreamtime Seminar |
