Mythology is the dream of the world. Let me explain.
Depth Psychology
First, a little Depth Psychology 101, a branch of psychology founded by Freud and Jung, and still barely understood. Many people know enough of depth psychological theories to talk of introverts and extroverts, anima and animus, getting in touch with the "feminine side," and complexes -- most of which are Jungian concepts. But they do not know about Jung's theory of the collective unconscious, or else imagine that he meant some kind of mass telepathy. In short, that he was nutty as a fruitcake.
That's not what he meant.
First, you must understand the idea of the conscious self -- that part that is reading and processing what I'm writing -- and the unconscious self -- all the parts of your psyche that aren't aware right now. Are you thinking about the smell of burning rice? Well, no, you weren't, until I mentioned it. Do you remember what terrified you most as a child? Maybe not, but there's probably traces of that experience stored in your unconscious.
Most of our mind has to be unconscious, or we'd go mad. Imagine what it would be like if everything you'd every felt or feared or done or imagined was bombarding you at once! That, Jung discovered, was one cause of schizophrenia; his patients were suffering from an inability to keep the unconscious out of their conscious minds.
There's a ton of stuff stored in the depths of our unconscious, like the data on a hard drive. Only a small bit of it is held in the "window" of our consciousness at any one time. What we think of as "I" is really -- as Jung often described it -- like a boat sailing on the depths of the self. Some things that never reach the surface still affect us profoundly. We have yearnings, habits, affinities for certain things, patterns of life that are uniquely ours, but we can never really explain why we act and feel in certain ways. That's due to the depths.
"Soul" Isn't a Four-Letter Word: It's More Than That
An aside: psyche literally means "soul," even if cognitive psychologists don't use the term, and prefer more technical-sounding words like "mind" and "mental structure." They're trying to be scientific, precise, and avoid poetic, intangible terminology. The trouble with treating psychology as science is that science simply isn't equipped to measure intangibles like thoughts and feelings, let alone unconscious layers of the self. Neuroscience tells us chemical reactions and brain anatomy, but it can't entirely explain what this thing is that's thinking, feeling, alive, aware. That's the soul. It's more than the sum of its physical parts.
Jungian Dream Theory
All right. Back to consciousness versus unconsciousness. Now let's talk about the depth psychological perspective on the nature of dreams.
There is one time when consciousness takes a back seat to unconsciousness. All of you living in the western hemisphere who are sensible and go to bed before I do are experiencing this right now.
We dream.
When we sleep, our reason shuts off. Fragments of our unconscious bubble up from below -- fears, joys, instincts, obsessions, memories, experiences that we're not consciously thinking about during the day -- and blend together in playful collages of fantasy and free association. The past few days' experiences and nagging thoughts often act as a trigger, stirring up older psychic material. Dreams let our mind grapple with the irrational, the deeper layers of the self that we can't really afford to immerse ourselves in during the day -- because if we did, we'd go mad, or at the very least miss a red light while we were pondering a vision of elephants as wide as the sea who carry the world on their shoulders and play golf with Tiger Woods.
Dreams let us touch the deepest parts of the self and shape them into stories, pictures, and images that may be disturbing, but which resonate at some deep level. Most dreams fade away upon waking: they're incompatible with conscious patterns of thought. But some stay. Those are the ones that have struck a chord deep in the soul, a chord that's still reverberating below the level of one's hearing, like a great bell. Sometimes that echo can last for years, and come back to us at odd moments. The dreams we remember -- even if we have no idea what they mean -- are like the magnificent sight of a great humpback leaping up into the sky and falling back with a splash. Have you ever seen one do that? You won't forget.
So what does all this have to do with mythology?
Jung had two radical thoughts.
The Collective Unconscious
One, that since human lives repeat certain patterns over and over -- childhood, growing up, dealing with parents, adolescence, puberty, sex, leaving home, marriage, parenthood, motherhood, aging, dying -- over millions of years, our psyches have evolved to be attuned to these patterns, in the same way that our bodies have changed to match our environments -- dark skin in sunny parts of the world, short noses that won't get frostbitten in the polar regions, and so on.
Those psychic patterns are buried in the unconscious. Oh, they're not so specific that we ALL have to have a goddess figure, or a rite of passage for when a boy is officially a man. The collective unconscious doesn't mean that we're all telepathically connected, any more than the similarity between different cars means that there's just one collective, singular engine powering every car on the road.
The collective unconscious just means we have a lot of the same patterns in our deep unconscious. So we tend to think along some of the same lines, and different peoples will often have myths and stories that sound remarkably similar. Everyone loves a trickster figure. Many people fear death. Myths deal with such things.
Mythology Arises From the Collective Unconscious
Jung's second crazy idea was that mythology, on a large scale, is akin to dreams for individuals. It's a complex web of stories that have built up over many, many centuries, like stalactites on a cave floor, from stories and ideas and images told by individuals that "clicked" with people around them. These were tales that didn't just suit the psyche of ONE person, the way a dream does. They were tales, or symbols, or profound images, that resonated with many, many people, because of the patterns in the collective unconscious. Over time, people kept re-telling these stories, remembering them and clinging to them like that dream you can never forget. The myths of a culture are its collective dreams.
The Soul Needs Myths to Thrive
It doesn't matter whether those stories started out as real historical events that got garbled into legend -- like King Arthur and the Trojan War -- or whether they were inventions -- like Bellerophon riding his winged horse Pegasus. In fact, said Jung, despite his own abiding belief in God, it doesn't actually make a difference to our psyches whether God or the gods have any real divine presence behind them. We can't know the truth; we can only have faith... or not. But religious beliefs, legends like King Arthur and Robin Hood, and fantasies like Santa Claus and unicorns have one thing in common: they add meaning to our lives, a sense of wonder, awe, beauty, or even terror. Without stories that satisfy our unconscious as well as conscious souls, life feels empty and pointless, and we ache for something to hold onto and believe in. That psychic hunger explains why so many people nowadays drift from one sensory-overloaded activity to the next (sex, drugs, driving too fast) trying to give their unconscious the psychic jolt it craves.
In this modern age, with the old religions and myths no longer feeling very relevant to the world we live in, a lot of people are suffering from psychic angst and depression. Others are confronted with a problem that didn't used to be so common: we were raised believing that our god or gods are THIS way, so how can YOUR way be right? But one of us is wrong! Do we blow up each other's buildings over this, or... what?
Psychic life was much easier when most people lived in isolated communities where everyone had a shared sense of identity, of what was normal, because they all had a body of myths and religious beliefs to draw on which fit their own society and defined "us" versus "other." Now we don't know what "us" means, or whom we dare call "them" without looking like an ignorant clod, or which "us" it still makes sense to believe.
Mythologies of the Future?
Meanwhile, there are new mythologies evolving. Star Wars and Lord of the Rings provide meaning and a rich tapestry of stories that satisfy fans at some deep level. They do so even when (and partly because) they follow the easy-to-predict "hero's journey" pattern identified by mythologist Joseph Campbell. Fans don't spend most of their talking about these stories for their overarching plots. Instead, fans are attached to or moved by certain characters, symbols, scenes, repeating patterns, subplots, tiny details, and snatches of dialog. Change Lord of the Rings to any enduringly popular TV show or movie and ask yourself: why? Why do certain works of fiction have such a profound hold over us?
Because they have touched the depths of our souls.
If those stories keep getting told and retold for several centuries, and don't just fade away like Annie Oakley stories... they'll be mythology.
