As our beliefs evolve beyond the dogma of religion and the rituals of magic, and psychology becomes more and more focused on lab rats and nuclear magnetic resonance, our dreams and our creativity continue to provide the most profound insights into our lives. But the great art and great dreams that illuminate our mythic realms are often ignored as we scurry from one transitory stimulus to another, like frantic rodents in a laboratory maze.

Rather than using our dreams to experience symbolic space and create meaning, we conceptualise, analyse and reduce our worlds until we are only left with meaningless results. The meaningful spaces created by our dreaming awareness cannot be directly understood by rational and reductionist analysis. Our unconscious awareness can often seem to be like the Big Bang white noise of an unattended TV, continually revealing a great mystery if we only knew what the question was.

Using an NMR brain scanner to try and find out what is really happening in our heads is like a television engineer try to make sense of the stories being played out on screen by measuring voltages inside the television set. The engineer will be able to detect that the TV is on and perhaps even which channel is being received. But they will never see the bigger picture because reducing a human epic to a series of voltages will never tell the real story. The voltages may be measurable signs but they are not contextual symbols. The engineers can perhaps define the signs but have no idea about the story space that the symbols create.

Our symbols help us to create a meaningful space where meaning can be expressed and encountered. A symbol resonates in meaningful space, helping our inner awareness to resonate with what we experience outside. It links the known and the unknown, the familiar and the unfamiliar. A symbol without meaningful space is merely a token sign, and trying to break a symbol down to dissect it merely destroys it. We experience symbols in their contextual spaces as energised images that reflect the stories all around us. Our shared symbols become an iconography that creates the spaces for our private dreams to connect with the public myth.

The gift of a symbol is the meaningful space it helps to create. All over the world, we all dream the same themes and produce common symbols from mandalas to Mac desktops. Our dreams are fantastic creators of resonant imagery and the art of interpreting our own waking dreams is to find the meaningful spaces, not just analysing the symbols by saying ‘this means that’. Words can only hint at this meaningful space and never fully explain it.

Aristotle observed that ‘The most skilful interpreter of dreams is he who has the facility for observing resemblances’. The symbols and spaces that we resonate with are those that most resemble our own individual myths and stories. Where our words explain, resonant symbols arouse intimations, possibilities and emotions beyond verbal expression.

As well as meaningfully connecting the fragments of our own experiences, our dreaming brains connect us back to more ancient experiences of ourselves. Our unconscious awareness invites us back into a mythic realm, a primordial landscape inhabited by the ghosts and gods of our ancestors. These dreams directly connect our own waking reality to dreams of an older and greater reality that has also produced all our art, mythology, religion and psychology.

These are all cultural routes that we use to reflect our selves as we try to find our individual paths to a wider awareness. Our unconscious expresses itself most eloquently in our dreams and myths and in our art and play; our dreams are the great art that we all spontaneously create. We don’t dream to be like each other; we dream to search for our self and know who we are amongst everyone else. We search by creating and we begin our search by copying others as we search for our own dreams.

Our first attempts to copy others often sound like bad poetry, spoken loudly. This is not herd behaviour; we are trying to find our own unspoken dream. First we mimic others and then as we start to hear our own voice emerging, we begin to drift away from others into our own unique poetry. Our poems and dreams both use ambiguity to create webs of associative meaning in the evocation of feeling and atmosphere. And our unconscious works like a poem with its ability to compress and expand memory and meaning, speaking its imagery and feeling its rhythms.

A poem doesn’t describe a space, it creates a space. This is also how play works, creating a space for potential and trying out new strategies and patterns. The ludic state is a serious business in all mammals as we simulate our waking reality and test out our strategies for the future. We play by adopting other identities and needs, beliefs and stories. When we play, we return to a dreaming state where we can develop our fundamental human awareness by stories, songs, chants and poetry. The individuals we value most highly are the performers who play for us and reflect our own deeper truths.

The arts that we profoundly play in and the dreams we autopoetically create are both emotionally loaded forms of communication. Like our collective myths, our works of art are public dreams. And like great art, dreams are not about what they are about; they are about creating our own individuality by stepping into the playground of the unknown and the unfamiliar. In dreams we are all artists, musicians, playwrights and actors.

And the more we play, and the more we create, the more the mundane patterns of everyday life become transfused with the radiant intensity of the incredible. The profound mysteries and secret resources of our ancient selves spring to life in the most unlikely places, a manifestation of our own uniqueness.

Our personal myths shine with meaning. They collect and connect all the remembered fragments of what we have experienced and what we hope to experience, and weave all our memories and hopes into a single shining story. But our memories are not static isolated objects filed away neatly in our brain. Instead, when we remember, we reconstruct fragments of past experience into a pattern that has meaning for us now. We don’t remember data points; we rebuild them by remembering the stories around them.

Towards the base of our brains, there is a pair of seahorse shaped structures, known by the Greek name for a seahorse, hippocampus. When we dream, and when we store and access memories, these two small seahorses become very active, playing a vital part in our dreams, memories and emotions. The hippocampus is largely responsible for creating new memories of experienced events and our waking experiences are reprocessed into connected memory fragments during dreaming sleep. Dreaming is how we create our meaningful memories.

In the deep currents of the brain’s electric oceans, memories of the specific are re-experienced and incorporated into the archetypal, blending the future into the past. Our dreams take the ancient repositories of all our memories and reimagine them with shiny newness. Dreaming is not something we experience passively; it’s something that we do very actively as we search for meaning. The main function of our memories is not storage, but to create a meaningful space for the creation of our individual meaning.

The hippocampus is also very active when we are emotionally aroused and we tend to be most emotionally engaged when experiencing something that is deeply meaningful for us. This is why we often learn more when emotionally immersed in a particular experience. This is also why most knowledge management and corporate memory initiatives tend to fail; they are usually so bland and dull that they put us to sleep rather than encouraging us to dream.

Corporate memories retrieved from a knowledge management system are usually presented completely out of context. That is why they often seem meaningless. Our memories are formed in recreations of the spaces that we originally experience them in, so they are always much stronger when experienced in the original context. Our dreaming awareness recreates those original spaces to most meaningfully record the memory. If want to know about gardening, ask a gardener. In a garden.

Dreams help to select and retain memories that are significant to us, the stories that are meaningful. Our dreams work through all those experiences that we are unconsciously immersed in during the day, and allow us to reflect on what was successful for us and what was not. This dreaming helps us to improve our strategies, and our key survival strategy as humans is to find meaning in our lives. Without meaning we cannot survive.

Our unconscious awareness illuminates the spaces that surround us and we create meaningful patterns in what we see reflected back. When we share the patterns of meaning that we see, we find ourselves telling our stories. The comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell observed <em>‘A dream is a private myth; a myth is a public dream’</em>. The stories that we tell give authentic voice to our dreams and in the social spaces we create, we share our personal myths in the stories that we tell each other.

Our personal myths seem to create an absolute reality; it seems that this is the only way that things can be. Like recurring dreams, we often experience personal myths as recurring phrases. ‘No-one recognises my genius’, ‘I am always let down by my colleagues’, ‘This technology will change the world’, ‘I always fall in love with the wrong sort of person’. Many of our myths have diverged quite far from reality and are actually confusing our real truths rather than clarifying them.

Because so many of our myths operate at an unconscious level, most of us are unaware of our own mythology. Instead we are bombarded by the manufactured mythology all around us. Some of these dysfunctional myths are told in the tedium of annual reports and marketing initiatives. Others appear in the bland broadcasts of corporate storytelling where manufactured myths are offered as synthetic substitutes for our authentic meaning and magic.

Much of corporate storytelling is transmission only; it has no real regard for the listener and creates no space to incorporate the story meaning in our own personal mythologies. Unless these public myths resonate and connect with private dreams, they will only be seen as attempts at manipulation. The lumpen prose of inauthentic public stories will be subverted and fragmented until they actually reflect our individual dreams and connect with our personal myths.

To truly connect with each other, we have to meaningfully connect with the fragmented nature of our own myths. We often develop our own personal mythology by copying fragments of current cultural myths in such a fashion as to develop and support our own beliefs. We are all mythical mimics and so we retell, remix and retweet until we see our own individual truths coalescing from the reflections of the stories that we are constantly immersed in.

The stories that have most meaning for us are the ones that we experience on a mythical level. We use much of our story telling culture, from fairy tales to mainstream blockbuster cinema, as a way of incorporating archetypal potential into our individual psyche. Our dreaming performs the same function at a private and personal level. No one can create our individual myths for us; we have to do that ourselves by truly living the excitement, intensity and drama of our own stories.