fate and destiny of dreams
As a mythologist there are many stories from around the world that I tell and re-tell in my practice of working with dreams. Because image loves image, the images in our dreams evoke stories from us—our personal memories, dreams, and reflections—even as they call up the images, dreams, and reflections of others, or what we commonly know of as folk tales, fairy tales, myths, legends, and indeed all aspects of the creative arts—art, poetry, music, literature and so on.
Now, as with all stories, we are not concerned with the truth, as it were, with a capital “T.” In other words, we are not required to “believe” in myths in a universal way for them to be true for us individually in the deepest sense. This is part of what it means to have a “mythic imagination.” The general rule is that if a story expands your possibilities for being and becoming yourself truly, run with it. If not, chuck it and keep looking for stories that do. For it’s not so much that “I” am the problem, rather it’s the stories I tell myself about myself that more often than not are getting in the way. In other words, we need to change the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves if we are to ever really change.
Each night as we sleep our dreams let us in on these stories as a way of reminding us, I think, not only of the stories we are telling ourselves about ourselves (and others) but also as a way of opening us up to the larger ongoing stories that are calling to our particular imaginations and to our destinies.
Joseph Campbell famously said that the “privilege of a lifetime is being who you are,” but I’m here to remind you (and myself) that it’s painstakingly hard work. Changing the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves first requires that we begin to become aware of what those stories are. This sounds easy enough, but we’ve been telling ourselves these stories for so long that we’ve forgotten that they’re stories at all; we tend to take them instead as cold, hard facts, and therefore unchanging.
As antidote to this kind of fossilized imagination, it helps to stock up on stories. Good stories. In other words, stories that are good to think with. Of all the stories I’ve told over the years, the one that I return to again and again is Plato’s Myth of Er. (Plato’s version has been around for almost 2, 500 years, so it’s a story with “legs” as they say.) There are several versions of the same myth told throughout the world. My nutshell version goes something like this:
Imagine there’s a place where all the souls of the yet-to-be-born are hanging out together waiting for the exact two right people to come together in the dark over here in the land of the living. Each soul is waiting for an image (or pattern) that embraces the whole of life all at once, with the exact right set of circumstances for that soul uniquely. Having arrived in this mythical place of the unborn from previous lives, the soul sees a set of parents as they come together in the dark and says, “Ah-hah! Them! Those parents, that life, that body, that family, that country, that culture, religion, language”–those exact circumstances, because the soul intuitively understands what it needs. It chooses life precisely.
But just when it chooses, as that same soul is walking from the realm of the unborn over to the land of the living to be born, it has to cross a river—the River Lethe or the “River of Forgetfulness,” where it forgets everything it just learned, forgets all that it just saw, forgets what made it choose this life. And it’s at this exact moment of forgetting when the waters inside the mother it chose gush out of her and that soul is born into this world of time and space, into this incarnation.
Some of you may recall that this was the central myth around which James Hillman’s bestselling “The Soul’s Code” was so brilliantly written (if you haven’t already read it, I highly recommend it, and if you have, it’s well worth a re-read). It’s been said that Plato tells this myth at the end of The Republic so that we won’t forget it. By doing this he seems to be suggesting that the task of any one life is to remember and display what the soul saw over in the land of the not-yet-born. Further, since ancient psychology located the soul in the heart, it turns out that our hearts hold the images of our destinies and calls us to them. Rumi says, “What the heart loves is the cure.” It helps, therefore, to move into an imagination of what the heart loves . . . not just the pop-up icons of what the heart loves, but what it really loves.
To this I would like to add one more thing: that it’s not what we do about our fates—about our particular shortcomings, our humanness and the fated aspects of our lives—but rather what we do with them that becomes the mark of us and decides whether or not we arrive at our destinies. And working with the stuff of dreams is one very effective way that we can learn to grapple with our fates and thereby align ourselves with our destinies.
blogger bio
Renée Coleman, Ph.D., earned her Mythological Studies doctorate (with an emphasis on Depth Psychology) at Pacifica Graduate Institutein Santa Barbara, CA in 2002. She makes her home in Santa Clarita, along with her husband, four children, their dog, two chickens, and a very noisy parrot. As a certified DreamTender, Dr. Coleman helps dreamers navigate through the many twists and turns of the dreamtime. Using a holistic, embodied approach to working with dreams, she mindfully guides souls from around the world in her private practice.
Contact Information for Renée:
661-288-1901
dreamtending@gmail.com
Love this Renee – I will refer to this article again and again as a way of remembering and reminding myself of the task at hand. Thank you!