Our personal myths shine with meaning. They collect and connect all the remembered fragments of what we have experienced and what we hope to experience, and weave all our memories and hopes into a single shining story. But our memories are not static isolated objects filed away neatly in our brain. Instead, when we remember, we reconstruct fragments of past experience into a pattern that has meaning for us now. We don’t remember data points; we rebuild them by remembering the stories around them. Towards the base of our brains, there is a pair of seahorse shaped structures, known by the Greek name for a seahorse, … [Read more...]

Our unconscious awareness illuminates the spaces that surround us and we create meaningful patterns in what we see reflected back. When we share the patterns of meaning that we see, we find ourselves telling our stories. The comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell observed ‘A dream is a private myth; a myth is a public dream’. The stories that we tell give authentic voice to our dreams and in the social spaces we create, we share our personal myths in the stories that we tell each other. Our personal myths seem to create an absolute reality; it seems that this is the only way that things can be. Like recurring … [Read more...]

Although we are unconsciously aware of the significance of our dreams, many of us find it a challenge to bring their value out into waking reality. We continually generate the most fantastic connections and insights in our unconscious but instead of trying to realise their worth, we usually we just let them slip away. Because they seem intangible, we can find it difficult to really own our own dreams, so we tend to externalise them in possessions and other people. Rather than seeing ourselves as the source of the dreams that we create, we constantly look outside to others to fulfil our dreams.  Our dreams end up in the … [Read more...]

Although our dreams seem to promise powerful awareness and profound insight into our circumstances, can we really use that unconscious awareness in the day to day, nitty gritty, bump and grind of our working lives? It may seem like no amount of insight and awareness can resurrect our rusting aspirations and coax them back into shiny new life. And if our dreams are so important, why do we forget them so easily? Surely the deep insight and wide awareness that we experience in our dreams should be far more persistent if they are of any real value to us? If our unconscious illuminations and reflections are so powerful, why … [Read more...]

As we embrace the stories that help us grow and break free from the patterns that limit us, our dreaming awareness keeps expanding outwards towards the edge of what we know. Even though we may feel that we have settled into a comfortable groove and no longer seek adventure, our dreams continue to search at the edges of what we know. Beyond the everyday and the routine, our dreams are exploring the edges of the known and unknown, the familiar and the unfamiliar. But rather than adventuring out into the unknown and unfamiliar, our conscious selves usually choose to stay well inside the boundaries of what we know. … [Read more...]