Something similar occurs in real life when we find a safe place to personify one or more of our “secret” longings and ideas. Matthew Miles (1964) writes about temporary settings in which alternative behaviors can be displayed and alternative endpoints can be achieved. Miles identifies such temporary systems as carnivals, retreats, parades, and festivals. We attend “devilish” festivals devoted to evil forces and death, as well as “frivolous” festivals devoted to carefree celebration, complete with costumes, fanciful displays, and the abandonment of traditional prohibitions. We might even participate in a temporary shifting of social order in the so-called Feasts of Fools (Cox, 1969). In all of these instances, real-like behaviors and displays are dreamlike in their unique and boundary-shattering presentation. They may often be inspired by our dreams, much as is the case with compelling images of the future (utopias). Conversely, we might ask: “Do carnivals, festivals, and parades exist in our dreams?” Yes, they do. And they can be transformative in our dreams, even if they allow for only temporary transformation (shift in sense of self) when enacted during our waking hours.
A fourth type of transformational dream is found among those dreams that confirm a specific endpoint. This often requires that the dream interacts with dream-like states (such as hypnogogic and hypnopompic) that exist immediately before and after we fall asleep. They might even occur in conjunction with our daydreams, our creative productions (stories, paintings, music), and our spontaneous reality-creating interactions (“subjective reality”) with other people (Brothers, 2001). We find this type of transformative dream in full display when Deidre Barrett (2001) writes about the Committee of Sleep. We nap, meet to solve problems, nap some more, and do some more planning and problem-solving. As in the case of prophesies, the committee can be solving mundane (transactional) problems and planning for an immediate future, or the committee can be using their dreams to bring about major transformations in not only the world in which they are working, but also in the individual roles each member of the committee is playing in this new world.
Finally, we have the transformational dreams that lead us back to a formerly cherished endpoint. Dorothy can find her way back home from the land of Oz, and Odysseus can finally return to his home in Ithaca. In many ways, nothing has really changed, despite a plethora of self-changing experiences. This transformative journey might best be portrayed as a Möbius Strip (which is called a “non-orientable surface”). The two ends of a strip of paper are twisted once and then glued together. You begin your travel at one point on this twisted strip, move along the strip, finding yourself on the opposite side of this piece of paper, and then return to the original point. You have been transformed by moving without interruption to the “opposite” side, yet you eventually travel back to where you began.
