Personal Myths and Collective Dreams

Joseph Campbell maintained that “A dream is a personal experience of that deep dark ground that is the support of our conscious lives, and a myth is society’s dream. The myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth.” I have long found this to be profoundly true.  In the ancient mind, there was rarely any doubt. In Homer's time, as in Cleopatra's or the Buddha's, dreams were nightly fields of interaction between gods, humans and others. Though we may be short on shared mythology in modern society, our dreams still bring us into mythic life. 

I found this excerpt in an old  journal, typed on a strip of paper I had used as a bookmark. The title of the dream was in upper case.as reproduced here:

The Big dream

IMAGES OF THE PRIMORDIAL GODS

I went through the lineage of the gods, backwards and forwards, from the anthropomorphic versions back to raw and primal images without clearly defined borders. I saw the Great Goddess. I saw Zeus streaming on the face of the waters, like an immense living island whose skin barely broke the surface. His colors were light olive and silver.
    His “hair” streamed in a deltoid pattern that could almost be mistaken for a beard, but was more reminiscent of a verdant triangle of public hair. Trying to describe his form (inside the dream) I evoked sea turtles and cuttlefish and (waking) the wings of a vast manta ray. But none of these similes contained the shape, which was too vast and too fluid to be comprehended in a single visioning.

I was excited that this dream found me again. It took me back to the era before humans had made much progress in domesticating the wild primal nature of the forces at play around them – of the elements, of land and sea, of Earth and Sky. I wrote my story "The Way to Tethys" in Mysterious Realities from another vision of this kind.
    I was curious that in the dream I call the oceanic deity Zeus rather than Poseidon, then recalled that their precincts and identities were probably not clearly demarcated in the archaic mind. Zeus is a generic term for a god as well as the name of the Big God enthroned in the Olympian pantheon (and one of the Big Three beside his brothers Poseidon and Hades). Nobody can decide whether the magnificent Artemision Bronze in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens is Zeus or Poseidon and whether what is missing from his raised fist is a trident or a thunderbolt.

The Greeks dreamed of the Egyptians who dreamed, it may be, of Atlantis. "Great stories are like dreams," Normandi Ellis takes up the big theme in Imagining the World into Existence: An Ancient Egyptian Manual of Consciousness. "The images that appear on the tomb walls and in the context of the Egyptians' sacred books are dreams...If we view the entire study of ancient consciousness and its impact on our lives as if it were a dream language, it becomes easier to peel back its layers and open to its possibilities." 

Illustration: "Eyebrows of Zeus" by Robert Moss

Egyptian dreams: I’ll See Your Snakes and Raise You

Yet again, I am dreaming of Egypt, the Egypt of mythistory and the Egypt of the imagination. From last night's dream report:

A drama is unfolding in the courtyard of a villa in ancient Egypt. Huge snakes, larger than humans, rise above on of the walls, raised up like cobras. Sometimes there are five, sometimes seven. On the other side of the compound are beings who can appear as humans or cats. There is contention between these forces. I am here to mediate, to make a balance. I have no fear of the serpents and I know the cat people have my back.

I approach the door of the house with the typescript of a book. I know this is what is needed to make peace. What may be a snake or an arm darts through the open door and carries my book to where it is needed. I know this is successful.

 Later I am with leaders of an esoteric order. The chief is a very old, very large woman. She may be deceased, projecting a form like the one she had near the end of physical life. Her right-hand man, the Warden, is also very old but maintains a military bearing. He is wearing a dark blue suit of heavy wool. They want me to understand that the correct use and pronunciation of a word with hidden vowels is essential. I have to figure this out; they won't just give me the combination. I see the owl glyph, doubled, and hear the consonants M M. I play with sounds like Mama. Then I see the owl glyph followed by the glyph of an open mouth and hear the consonants as M R. This brings me to MARI – and maybe Mary? It seems she is the very heart of the mysteries. 

Feelings: Excited, intrigued

Reality check: I am again immersed in Egyptian studies. Yesterday I was reading The Dawning Moon of the Mind, Susan Brind Morrow’s beautiful rendition of the poetic text from the Pyramid of Unis (also spelled Unas). Long ago I was stirred to the roots of my being when I read earlier translations  of related texts in the splendid recreation of chambers from the mastaba tomb of Unis’s son, Unis-Ankh, at the Field Museum in Chicago. I have been studying hieroglyphs again, partly inspired by the remarkable work of Normandi Ells, whose new book Hieroglyphic Words of Power is being published this year.  I have a hunch that I know the identity of the esoteric luminaries in the last scene. They dreamed of Egypt too. As so often, my dreams have set me research assignments. And maybe another book to write?

Drawings from Robert Moss journal