MDS DreamScene Magazine
Volume 1        March 2004

DreamScene Personality J.K. Rowling      Creator of Harry Potter Enter the world of J.K. Rowling, the single mother who was catapulted from welfare to multi-millionaire in just of a handful of years through talented storytelling and interesting characters. By the end of 2001, she had sold an estimated 150 million books in nearly 50 languages. Warner Bros. plans to adapt all of the books for the screen....

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INSIGHTS to the DREAM Topic: ------- The Relationship of Myth and Dream Dreams and Myth Joseph Campbell's Insights to Dream From The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers   Bill Moyers: You talk about mythology existing here and now in dreamtime. What is dreamtime? Campbell: This is the time you get into when you go to sleep and have a dream that talks about permanent conditions within your own psyche as they relate to the temporal conditions of your life right now. For example, you may be worried about whether you are going to pass an exam. Then you have a dream of some kind of failure, and you find that failure will be associated with many other failures in your life. They are all piled up together there. Freud says even the most fully expounded dream is not really fully expounded. The dream is an exhaustible source of spiritual information about yourself. Now the level of dream of "Will I pass the exam?" or "Should I marry this girl?" - that is purely personal. But, on another level, the problem of passing the exam is not simply a personal problem. Everyone has to pass a threshold of some kind. That is an archetypal thing. So there is a basic mythological theme there even though it is a personal dream. These two levels - the personal aspect and then the big general problem of which the person's problem is a local example - are found in all cultures. For example, everyone has the problem of facing death. This is a standard mystery. Moyers: What do we learn from our dreams? Campbell: You learn about yourself. Moyers: How do we pay attention to our dreams? Campbell: All you have to do is remember your dream in the first place, and write it down. Then take one little fraction of the dream, one or two images or ideas, and associate with them. Write down what comes to your mind, and again what comes to your mind, and again. You'll find that the dream is based on a body of experiences that have some kind of significance in your life and that you didn't know were influencing you. Soon the next dream will come along, and your interpretation will go further. Moyers: Why is a myth different from a dream? Campbell: Oh, because a dream is a personl experience of that deep, dark ground that is the support of our conscious lives, and a myth is the society's dream. The myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth. If your private myth, your dream, happens to coincide with that of the society, you are in good accord with your group. If it isn't, you've got an adventure in the dark forest ahead of you. I think of mythology as the homeland of the muses, the inspirers of art, the inspirers of poetry. To see life as a poem and yourself participating in a poem is what the myth does for you. Read the complete article and the whole series

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