Transformational Dreams
Is it sufficient for dreams to help us solve immediate problems in our lives? Might dreams also offer images and experiences that can be transformative in nature and preparatory regarding our future? While we have been solving problems in our Transactional dreams or bringing in our old home or our now-deceased parents in order to portray long-held values and aspirations, the incentive to do this problem-solving and portraying is based primarily on a reaction to something that occurred during our waking hours. We can be proactive in considering what is in front of us and how we can best prepare ourselves for this future. Through our dreams, we can “lean into the future” (Bergquist and Mura, 2011) and “learn into the future” (Scharmer, 2009).
Frequently, our transformational search is conveyed in our dreams as a journey, much as our society is inclined to produce mythic images of the journey to express our collective yearning for transformation. We have only to consider the narrative of the journey to be found in The Wizard of Oz or the television series about Star Trek in the future. Journeys were portrayed in the past through noted novels such as Gulliver’s Travels and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. There is even the much shorter, but just as transformative, journey of Alice down the rabbit hole and into Wonderland. Classical music compositions called Tone Poems often portray a journey through a perilous life (such as Richard Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks) or up a mountain (Strauss’s Alpine Symphony).
What these various accounts of journey hold in common is what Joseph Campbell calls the universal myth of a hero’s journey (Campbell, 2025). This myth typically contains narratives of departure, initiation, and return. A hero who leaves the ordinary world, faces challenges in a special or supernatural world, achieves a decisive victory, and returns transformed, often bringing a boon to their community. There is perhaps no better example of this journey of the hero than the Odyssey of Homer’s Ulysses. It is through many lands that this heroic figure travels, “learning as he goes” and arriving home a more complete man. There is even some reason to believe that Ulysses was traveling through the nine states of the Enneagram during his journey (Goldberg, 2006). This is a remarkable example of a fully encompassing transformation—though at the expense of Penelope, his ever-suffering wife.
We find these heroic journeys portrayed not only in the novels, movies, and television series of our society, but also in our personal dreams. While Transactional dreams tend to be relatively short, with meaning packed into a short time interval, the Transformational dreams often are quite lengthy. The journey narrative might even be presented in several successive dreams (we dream, wake up, fall back to sleep, and resume our dream).
