Society wants us to live a planned existence, following paths that have been travelled by others.  Tried and true.  The known, the expected, the controlled, the safe.  The path of the wanderer is not this.  The path of the wanderer is an experiment with the unknown.  To idle.  To daydream.*
Keri Smith

Life had gotten too busy. It seemed as if my existence had become just one long to-do list. I had forgotten about my dreams, my goals, my what-ifs, my what-if-I-coulds.**
Amy Haines

Humans are at their best when
living within a larger story,
Becoming lost or diminished or both
in the ordinary and everyday;
A myth provides wellbeing, provides
the nurture we need to keep developing
throughout our lives as we are capable of;
Joseph Campbell likens this to a joey growing in
their mother’s pouch:
Now, in order to aid personal development,
mythology does not have to be reasonable,
it doesn’t have to be rational,
it doesn’t have to be true;
it has to be comfortable,
like a pouch.^

The psalmist reflects this in declaring:
I have calmed and quieted my soul,
… my soul is like the weaned child that is with me.
O Israel, hope in the Lord from this time on and for evermore.^^

Joseph Campbell outlines how a myth
must function on four levels:
Providing consciousness with a sense of meaning;
Presenting an image of the Cosmos to maintain mystical awe;
Validating and maintaining a certain sociological system;
Psychologically and pedagogically carrying a person through life.

He argues that the
second and third of these have been taken over
by secular orders and so our traditional myths
no longer serve us as we need them to;
We need new myths or to rethink the old,
or a combination of the two if we are to
move into stories of wellbeing,
To a calm and quiet soul:
In contrast to the Western reliance on drugs
and verbal therapies, other traditions around the world
rely on mindfulness, movement, rhythms and action.*^

The psychiatrist Carl Jung decided that he needed to find and
enact his own myth,
Discovering it in building,
Describing it as his “task of tasks,” it led to him
creating his retreat home in Ascona,
A place where many more thoughts and ideas were
to emerge and grow his work.

Jung had returned to his childhood for
the symbols that most spoke to him,
And he found memories of building with small stones
that led him to build with big stones;
Campbell proffers:
The way to find your own myth
is to determine those traditional symbols
that speak to you and use them,
you might say,
as bases for meditation.
Let the work for you.^

In dreamwhispering,
This is what we are about.

*Keri Smith’s The Wander Society;
**Ryder Carroll’s The Bullet Journal Method;
^Joseph Campbell’s Pathways to Bliss;
^^Psalm 131:2-3;
*^Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score.