Epic Structure Found in a Ten-Year Dream Journal

Johnston, Barbara Anne. (2004). Epic Structure Found in a Ten-Year Dream Journal Dream Epic: The Serpent and The Rose (Doctoral dissertation, Pacifica Graduate Institute, 2004). UMI No. 3155822.

Dreams are a primary medium of the unconscious, bringing its riches, both terrifying and benign, into consciousness to facilitate the integration between these two major terrains of the psyche. Typically dreams are explored as singular events, or only in a small series, in psychotherapy or in other methods of hermeneutical interpretations in which the individual desires personal psychological growth.

As a literary genre, epic is the most inclusive and perhaps most universal and ongoing structure of the psyche as well as an enveloping genre of soul’s terrain that can be known if it is expressed poetically or empirically through the unique method used in this dissertation which can trace its patterns. In this production-type dissertation, dreams from a journal kept for a decade are combined to embody many of the patterns of epic as a poetic genre. By combining dreams over such an extended period of time, this created epic captures and makes visible Psyche’s movement.

The Serpent and The Rose was written by re-activating the dreams and engaging the dreams as, initially, creative instruments of Psyche. They emerged from the unconscious as its creative eruption into consciousness. I used active imagination to move into the dreamscapes to be receptive to and in mimesis with Psyche in the recreation of the dreams. During this process the exercise of active imagination expanded the dreams by inviting more insights into the dream figures. It also continued the dreams in a waking state which allowed Psyche to combine the dreams in a narrative form that I consciously crafted from what I have learned of epic structure.

The theoretical analysis demonstrates the epic nature of the combined dreams and soul’s movement throughout the narrative by using the hermeneutic of bringing together the epic genre, analytical psychology, archetypal psychology, and mythology. Identifying the archetypes, mythologies and mythemes revealed in the dreams shows their relevance to the goal of the epic journey: to retrieve the culture’s original mythology, reformulate it, and refound the cultural mythology that no longer supports the culture because it had lost its psychological grounding.