PREFACE

An Invitation to the Hero’s Journey

I met a guy who told me he was an exile transcendentally engaged with an alchemy of invisible worlds, too engrossed by far to remember his country, the ache of all he had to leave behind, enflamed nightly by his nameless supernals, enflamed nightly by his impossible task, and I thought why not?

—DARREN HUGHES, SHARED VIA PERSONAL COMMUNICATION

I am a dreamer and have been all my life. I have always enjoyed having and discussing dreams and hearing about other people’s amazing adventures. Throughout life, distractions and responsibilities naturally come up that have taken me away from my dream work, but I’ve always come back to it. Somehow, it feels as if something is missing from my life when I’m not paying attention to my dreams. To me, dreams feel essential, and listening to them is a spiritual practice.

Dreams can have extreme impacts on our lives if we choose to listen to them. Some dreams can make a major impact; they are often called big dreams because they make such a lasting impression. Understanding and incorporating these dreams into our daily lives, implementing the changes that they sometimes ask us to make, and sharing these experiences with others can ultimately change our sense of reality.

Perhaps like many of you, I’ve been able to lucid dream since I was quite young—I just didn’t realize that was what it was. These dreams have ranged from minor experiences that last a few moments to experiences that go on for what seems like hours, from merely being aware that I am dreaming to having full-blown conversations with characters in my dreams or trying to control the physics of the dream environment.

When I was young, most of the people around me disregarded dreams as mental noise. However, my mother, who is a deeply religious person, explained to me that dreams played an important role in prophecy and encouraged me to look for meaning in mine. Still, I felt a disconnect between how important my dreams felt and any impact they might have on my waking life. I wanted to close that gap.

And yet, making that leap was a scary prospect, and my dreams told me as much. The first big dream I remember hinted at the task ahead of me:

I am walking through a college campus or schoolyard and see a large building. I become aware that I am dreaming when I recognize that the chapel I am looking at does not exist in the real world. I walk into the chapel, and it opens up into pews full of people working. I ask a few students what they’re doing, and they respond that they are doing homework. They seem friendly and open to answering my questions.

This dream helped me to see that there is more going on behind the wakeful consciousness in the higher areas of the unconscious, which I call the Self.

It would be years before I fully accepted the challenge. I felt conflicted about incorporating the messages I felt my dreams were giving me. They didn’t line up with my worldview at the time, which was a mixture of stubborn adherence to the scientific method and inherited monotheistic beliefs.

It wasn’t until I dove into Jungian psychology and Joseph Campbell’s work that I started to fully realize the similarity between my dream experiences and the themes and archetypes described by these two thinkers. Campbell’s idea of the Hero’s Journey accurately summarized my dream experiences. He calls the Hero’s Journey “a magnification of the formula represented in the rites of passage: separation-initiationreturn.” His definition may be more simply described as an adventure on which the hero embarks. A crisis initiates the journey, then the Hero overcomes an adversary, and then he or she finally returns, changed in some way. Jung called this process individuation, by which he meant the complete actualization of the whole human being through bringing the conscious and the unconscious into balance.

After I understood my own dreams in terms of the individuation process, I began to see the anatomy of dreams and to navigate the map of the deeper levels of understanding dreams offer. As I released the desire to control the dream experience and instead allowed them to express naturally, I was able to start to face unknown fears, including death. This transformed my life in ways that no previous experience had.

As I’ve further explored my dreams and related my personal experiences to thousands of others, I’ve come to believe that all dreams contain an invitation and opportunity to take the Hero’s Journey. While Campbell was describing a mythological journey that we are all taking during our waking life, we can make this journey much more personal in dreams, bringing about even greater transformation.

It’s my hope that sharing part of my ongoing individuation process can not only provide you with an overview of the limitless variety of experiences available in the dream world, but also offer some encouragement—a traveling companion as you find new meaning in your dreams. And ultimately, I hope that you will discover your own Hero’s Journey.