26

The Reward

A Reflection

hen heroes are at the moment of reward, they can look back and see how all the people, events, and learning along the journey conspired to get them to this point. Heroes see the journey not as an event that took place but as a cumulative snapshot of their entire life. A moment of enlightenment may feel like just that—a sudden understanding of everything—but that moment is only the next step on a long path. So the moment of reward on the Hero’s Journey, while it is an ending of sorts, is not the end. It’s simply another point on the map.

On my personal journey, the reward was a sudden clarity about why I was exploring dreams in the first place. I had always been fascinated by my dreams, and when I started to actively work with my dreams, something inside me drove an intense desire to keep exploring. It was as if my soul were calling me. Over time, reflecting on and truly listening to my dreams led me to a moment of epiphany about their purpose: dreams are here to help us find our true selves.

Ironically, this discovery, and the journey that led me to it, has had at least as significant an impact on my waking life as it has on my dream practice. I often find myself in waking situations where I pause and take a moment to simply observe. In the dream world I react exactly the same way. Both of these reactions are a result of lucid dreaming techniques. And just as I’ve learned to make choices and adapt in the dream world, I’ve learned to do the same in everyday life.

A key component of what makes this moment of pause remarkable and invaluable in life is its ability to help identify emotions from moment to moment. Understanding and then facing fears was the most transformational aspect of my dream work. Fear fractures us into smaller and smaller portions as we disassociate from those fears. If we can parse dream monsters and phantoms as fears in our waking lives, and put these fears away in boxes in the unconscious, we no longer have to see them as a part of ourselves. Rather, we can then treat our fears as something other that we can hate, reject, or ignore.

As well, by facing these fears, we develop the courage to be accountable for who we are, in all of our beauty and hideousness. We face the horrors we are capable of. Once we clearly see the darker aspects we keep buried in the personal and collective unconscious, we grow past them, look at them squarely, let them dismantle us, and become whole again. We reemerge as more mature individuals.

I want to stress the fear factor for a minute, in case my account makes it sound too easy. Fear is powerful; there’s a reason that “Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid” is such a popular Bible verse. Humans are mammals hardwired for safety, so we are highly attuned to danger and fear. This is a primal force that lives deep within our collective and individual unconscious. Fear isn’t something that humans can simply eradicate, so it’s important—but difficult—to learn how to manage it.

Personally, I struggled with the fear of death. I feared the fact of death, like most of us do, but it also was intensely upsetting for me to think about what happens after we die. Some might say that lucid dreaming and out-of-body experiences are enough evidence to believe in the afterlife, but the contrary is true for me. It just told me that any reality is plausible; heaven and hell are symbolic realms created by our collective imagination in an effort to explain the inexplicable. Believing in any particular afterlife generated anxiety about death much the same way that my religious background did. But dream work reminds us that extinguishing our essential self—which I believe contains the core fear of death—is simply not possible. Consciousness lives in us and beyond us. Dream work allows us to relinquish the desire to control the fact of death and to identify the aspects of ourselves that are hidden from the waking consciousness. That’s all I need to understand.

Additionally, I had significant anxiety and fear around my identity. We’re all fundamentally selfish and capable of inflicting incredible damage in the right (or wrong) circumstances. To ignore those darker aspects of ourselves is like having an alternative personality hidden from everyone’s view—including our own. That shadow will inevitably demand to be seen. Again, it’s a case of let go or be dragged along.

Merging with my shadow allowed me to identify with the parts of myself that I don’t necessarily like. Beyond that, dream work gave me a frame to treat those parts like any other aspect of my personality rather than as the enemy that Jung depicted. “We simply accuse our enemy of our own unadmitted faults.” Merging with the shadow is looking into the mirror of our own faults, becoming human, and humbling ourselves. Nightmares and horrible dreams are doing their best to convey this message and to teach us that in order to achieve greatness, you also need darkness. By destroying or ignoring one, you limit the other.

The reward of this merging of our disparate selves is kindness, understanding, and compassion for the Self and for others. That seems to be the reason that facing the Guardian of the Threshold may not be a one-off experience. Dreams may ask us to confront the Guardian of the Threshold over and over: every encounter with the shadow increases our ability to face ourselves.

Identifying with the anima in the dream of the goddess allowed me to interact with some of the more unconscious aspects of myself. Crossing through the veil into the land of the dead was a metaphorical representation of how I treated my creative feminine nature, tucked away and hidden from daily life. Through dreams, I could experience some of the suffering that this hiding away had created, and I was able to make better choices. Confronting the Father, going through the atonement of being cut apart and made anew, also cut away the parts of me that somehow had been displaced and disfigured and realigned them into a cohesive body. This intense atonement, experienced through lucid dreams, changed who I was from that point on.

In summation, it is clear that dreaming is not so different from waking life. They are both journeys, or simulations, that manifest out of our ideas and beliefs, both individual and collective. Dreams change as beliefs change. We can bring our conscious mind into the dream space to mingle with those parts of ourselves that are tethered to something much greater. Though this may seem powerful and at first exhilarating, we soon learn that the real power of lucid dreaming comes from surrender.

While all aspects of our consciousness may feel true or real, when we examine them more closely under the lens of lucid dreaming, we see that they may be an illusion—this is true for fear, death, life, and dreaming. These concepts are all aspects of the same thing, are all shards flowing out of the shattered consciousness. In order to get past the illusion of reality, you must go on the journey—past our ideas about reality, past our symbolic representations of ourselves, and into the heart of the true self.