“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will control your life and you will call it fate.” – Jung

Carl Jung asked, what myth are you living? I don’t think most of us go around thinking of our lives as myth. Myths are for ye olden days, long before we “knew better.” But if we look around we can see them playing out all the time, the myth of the hero, rebel, lover, trickster, and on. It’s just much harder to see what myths drive our own lives. When we don’t look at or try to understand them, they can run roughshod over our lives.

So what are we living out that we are unaware of? How do we figure out what myths drive our life? Our dreams. They offer us a glimpse into our inner workings, a way to get in touch with the mysterious underpinnings of what drives our lives. Within dreams there exist delineations, and very often you will hear people talk about a big dream. A big dream is the dream that rocks our world. Maybe we wake up with a start, or can’t get the dream out of our head, maybe it terrifies us every time we think about it. Many times there is an other worldly feeling connected to the dream, because it points beyond standard waking day protocol. It may point us to something new that wants to be lived. These dreams are full of potential and can offer us the missing pieces we’ve been searching for. They call us to live a larger life, the life we were meant to live. Small dreams may nudge you, big dreams give you a jolt. They can help uncover the myths of our life, what we are working through or towards, if we have the nerve to unpack them.

I had what I would call a big dream when I was 16. It terrified me. I don’t believe I ever wrote it down, I didn’t have to, it never left me. I can repeat it word for word, step by step to this day. It comes to visit me now and then. Not until I saw a dream analyst did it fully connect for me. She mentioned a fairy tale it reminded her of and it was like I had been struck by lightening. Somehow it all immediately made sense, pieces of my life fell into place, and I saw, very clearly, a major theme of my life. This is what big dreams do, they give us a bigger perspective.

The fairy tale it reminded my analyst of was the Handless Maiden. Estes has a great chapter on it in Women Who Run With the Wolves, and Nelson has half a book devoted to it in, Here All Dwell Free. For me and my dream, it’s about giving the feminine a voice in this patriarchal world we live in. It’s about the urgency and the necessity to give the most delicate things within the soul a place to bloom. It is very easy to have the most sensitive things we feel and believe get trampled by the world around us. These are the very things that need space, nurturing, and a voice. These feelings and ways of being are not easily grasped or understood, and need our patience and persistence.

This is a very beautiful, although disconcerting, fairy tale. There is brutality and long suffering. In the end it is the acts of bravery and faith that lead the Handless Maiden to her own unique life and the ability to live it truthfully and fully. These are the very things that will lead us to live our authenticity as well. It’s our act of creation. And we have the chance to create and recreate every minute of everyday. What we find when we dig deeper than we thought we ever could is the truth of who we are. In the end it is our dreams, fairy tales, myths, legends, and lore that can point the way out of the mists and into the light.

Here’s to uncovering the myths that underpin your life.

kb