Recently, a number of my clients have been dreaming about being in a wild wood.  In many of these dreams, there was a sense of encroachment and threat, with the forest being clear felled by anonymous figures.

Often when we dream of forests, we are exploring areas of ourselves that may be unknown to us and unseen by others.  In waking life, the traditional response to encountering the unknown in a forest is to cut the forest down to try and make the unknown known. 

Until relatively recently, Britain used to be covered in broadleaved forest from south to north.  Year by year, it was removed to deny sanctuary to wild creatures and those who lived beyond the law.  Now there are only a few square miles of ancient woodland left and those once familiar sanctuaries are gone.

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In Dreamwork, we often spend time exploring the connections between people, places, events and objects.  As we do this, we are not just looking for the presence of a connection, but far more importantly, we are looking at the quality of the relationship.

However, in the current social networking frenzy, as seen at  facebook, MySpace and Bebo, the focus is on the presence of the connection, rather than on its quality.  In these networks, it often seems preferable to have 500 friends of unknown quality, rather than a few real friends who share truly initmate connections.  For facebook tarts, the quantity, rather than the quality, of friends is what they use to confirm their apparent social rank and status.

This ranking system also reflected in other methods of identifying and classifying connections, such as Google Page Rank, where the emphasis is on the presence and quantity of incoming links, rather than their quality or context.

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Out to The Fruitmarket Gallery last night to the opening of their ‘Print The Legend’ exhibition.

The exhibition, curated by Patricia Bickers, celebrates the concept of the Wild West as a possibility space.

In this land of possibility space, the archetypal often meets the specific, as shown in the film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

In the film, Dutton Peabody, the editor of the Shinbone Star speaks the classic line ‘This is the west, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend’.

When we dream, we often find ourselves printing the legend.  We take our own personal myths and legends and print them in the reality of our dreams.

As Joseph Campbell said ‘A myth is a public dream, a dream is a private myth’.