The Wordless Dream Language of Myth

Chinese Goddess Nuwa by Unknown

"Until we get to dreams, there is a tendency to think of stories as 'words.' In dreams we experience stories as structures and patterns that evoke images and experiences, often without words...In dealing with dreams, such noted authorities as James Hillman have instructed us to "hold the image."By 'Holding the image,' the conscious mind can begin to discern patterns and structures that can eventually reveal rich psychic content...Some have said that, 'Myths are cultural dreams.'" Ontogenic Mythotypes by G. Charles Andersen

What is the relationship between language and dream? Dream is a language in and of itself. Language is mutable to Dream Language, when traditional dream interpretation is foregone, and creative writing is utilized as a means to "hold the image" in the mind of James Hillman. Such psychological import brings to mind the psychoactive artistry of Laurence Caruana and others who have respected the imagination as a prehuman remnant of archaic information. "The world is made of language" says Terence McKenna. And so, in using that language, we may hear our mythic vocation, a calling towards that which we had never dreamed, unearthed as from the unsaid and unconscious mysteries of our own psychic invention. 

__________

What a breath of fresh air! To drink, and see. I could feel my brother’s weeping, his heart caving in his shaking flesh as he triumphed again over a nervous breakdown, carrying him by air through the over-privileged dome of Western skies. And into the darkened haunt of old coast bumhood, and the numbing agents of a musical life amid the New England smile of selfish mockery and divulging swine. The ruthless remark, a self intensified in the bitter alcoholic night, the cobblestone streets, swept of hurricane feet and tires of his once-sickened flight returning.

Lombard Landscape by Fulvia Bisi

At home, lost to the time of his forgetting, he returns, an old man in his distant youth. The tingling respite of belonging in the gutters of Eastern fame, the ruinous gold of a mind enslaved to eternal seeking, he clambered down tumbling steps of creaking wood and linoleum brains, as I stared immobilized into the dark porch silhouette. A large man sat there, with dreadlocks lower than his back, and as he lifted an ember of smoke to his lips, his dark skin shone with the muscular life of a physical laborer on break, alone, a nameless body of the historic present.

Man with a Hoe by Jean-Francois Millet

I could only see him clearly under the bar lighting. The dizzying indoor lunacy of the drinker’s habit, a hovel of bored and roughened life spoke through his bristling mouth. After the rare silence of a few pints, he ended the night with means to see each other again. And like that, he disappeared in the great fog of blackness, opaque as the light-polluted air of a once booming industrial city, now smoking upward with the final ashen gasp of smoky incineration. 

__________

“What grievous horror betook these dumb streets?”

Touched with the unkindness of a meek following
From the near elderly, an old town deemed to inquietude
...
Taking off the English hat of a long gone America
Seeing no one in the mist fired laugh from this war

Breathing ocean
Suffocated by the calm before the storm
...
Clucking behind the chicken wire of suburban fate
...
Gripping for death at the edge of the western, manifest

As nature’s law thrives in disbelief

excerpts from "Calm before the Storm"