A Dragon Encounter

Atonement with the father

I journal daily in the Notes app on my phone. As I drink my morning cup of hot ginger and black peppercorn chai, I write a line or two about what I'm grateful for. If I've had a vivid dream, I write it down before I forget the details. I started doing this because some of the dreams had such crazy, fantastic elements, and I thought I could use them in my novel.

One morning, I wrote down this scene from my latest dream: I was talking to the back of a dragon who stood in my way. I want to go into the world, I told the dragon, let me pass. The dragon slowly turned his head, lowering it until the inverted triangle of his face was directly in front of me. He looked fierce and terrifying, and flames emerged from his nostrils, almost scorching my face.

"You're not going anywhere," he boomed authoritatively before turning and ignoring me.

I remember standing there, looking at his immense back, shaking, feeling terrified, and my heart racing. I also recognized a tiny, tiny, new feeling of needing to pit my feeble strength against the dragon.

This dream image stirred something within me because, at that time, I was at odds with someone who held considerable authority over me. They were a mentor-like figure, someone I admired greatly for their courage, tenacity, and success, and their support of me. I was terrified of disappointing them even as I knew it was time for me to emerge from their shadow and try something new of my own. But I didn’t have the courage to confront them with this. Even though I was an adult, I felt like a child, stuck and scared.

Did the dream dragon represent them? I realized the dream dragon felt protective and intimidating, both a wall and a ceiling. I couldn't see what lay beyond the dragon. So, it was also a threshold. 

Because it felt like the dragon had a message for me, I cautiously tried a little active imagination. I remember thinking of the dragon and wishing if only I had some of the dragon's power and strength, and almost immediately, something shifted within me and the imaginal dragon answered: You have me. I am inside you.

I remember feeling shocked, followed almost immediately by a profound feeling of wonder and empowerment. For the first time in weeks, I felt more equal to the necessary task ahead of me.

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We are discussing the stages of Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey through personal essays and storytelling. Campbell proposed a monomyth, a universal story arc called the hero’s journey, that he said was found in myths and stories from cultures around the world. The hero sets forth on an adventure (departure), faces obstacles and trials (initiation), is victorious over them, and returns with boons and gifts to share with the rest of the world (return). The hero’s journey can be an external adventure though it always involves an inner transformative journey. You might be familiar with books or movies that use this arc (for example, Star Wars). In your life, you might look for parallels where you overcame your fears, the discouragement of others, or other internal or external blocks and took steps towards a goal. You might’ve had to learn new skills, take on rivals, and do things that pulled you out of your comfort zone, and regardless of the outcome, engaging with this process changed you forever. 

You can read each post as a standalone or as part of the hero's journey series. 

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Atonement With The Father

The father holds great authority in a traditional, patriarchal society. In his book, The Hero With A Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell talks about the terrifying aspect of the father and the idea that we are at the mercy of his whims. The father functions as the threshold, and its guardian, that a child has to pass through to enter adulthood. This stage of the hero’s journey is part of the initiation, and the father performs a testing function to see if the initiate is worthy of what he seeks.

Whether he knows it or not, and no matter what his position in society, the father is the initiating priest through whom the young being passes on into the larger world.

-Joseph Campbell, The Hero With A Thousand Faces

The traditional idea of initiation combines an introduction of the candidate into the techniques, duties, and prerogatives of his vocation with a radical readjustment of his emotional relationship to the parental images. The mystagogue is to entrust the symbols of office only to a son who has been effectually purged of all inappropriate infantile cathexes-for whom the just, impersonal exercise of the powers will not be rendered impossible by unconscious motives of self-aggrandizement, personal preference, or resentment. Ideally, the invested one has been divested of his mere humanity and is representative of an impersonal cosmic force. He is the twice-born: he has become himself the father. And he is competent consequently now to enact himself the role of the initiator, the guide, the sun door, through whom one may pass from infantile illusions of good and evil to an experience of the majesty of cosmic law, purged of hope and fear, and at peace in understanding the revelation of being.”

-Joseph Campbell, The Hero With A Thousand Faces

He is twice-born: he has become himself the father. This stage of the hero’s journey can happen at any age, and is about brushing up against the limits of some (out-there, powerful external or an inner, unconscious and punitive) authority and reaching for conscious self-authority.

Atonement (at-one-ment) consists in no more than the abandonment of the self-generated double monster-the dragon thought to be God (superego) and the dragon thought to be Sin (repressed id). But this requires an abandonment of the attachment to ego itself, and that is what is difficult.”

I’d love to hear your experiences of this stage of the hero’s journey. Please share your thoughts by leaving a comment below.