Enacting the Symbolic: Dream, Myth, and Ritual
Enacting the Symbolic: Dream, Myth, and Ritual
Transdisciplinary and transcultural explorations of the dream world and its connections with waking life.
The project here is to bring together works that engage with culturally diverse wisdom traditions, to begin to articulate an enactive conception of the role of dream, myth, ritual, and symbol in healing and transformational processes. Across cultural traditions, tending to our dreaming has been seen as a means of sensitizing us to the symbolic dimension of our lives in order to engage more intentionally within the archetypal reality that we are co-inhabiting and co-constructing together. How might dreaming support processes of sense-making and world making, allowing us to enlarge our understanding of reality?
Importantly, this edition builds upon a growing movement within cognitive science and neuroscience where the enactive approach is already being actively mobilised to study sleep. While mainstream neuroscience has often viewed dreaming as passive neural noise, contemporary cognitive science increasingly explores the possibility that sleep consciousness is an active, embodied process of sense-making. From an enactive perspective, dreaming can be conceptualised as a dynamic, offline simulation of sensorimotor coupling where the mind-body system generates meaning free from immediate environmental constraints. We invite contributors to investigate how this perspective might interface with empirical models of sleep—including default mode network activity, neuroplasticity, and affective regulation. By emphasizing neurophenomenology, we hope to explore how first-person dream narratives and third-person neurodynamics might mutually inform one another. We welcome papers that test, critique, or expand upon these enactive assumptions, exploring how the dreaming mind-body alters its structural coupling with reality to facilitate psychological transformation.
From a psychotherapeutic perspective: Jung claimed that a person cannot heal without undergoing a numinal experience. That is, healing requires the ego to touch something greater than itself. One means of understanding this phenomenon is through what has been termed the transcendent function: a psychological process whereby engaging with the symbolic domain allows a bridge to form between conscious ego and unconscious Self, fostering growth and metamorphosis. It is the encounter with the transcendent, through the archetypal and symbolic reality disclosed through the dreaming realm, that offers healing, because it's a healing of one's relation to reality. In articulating the healing function of dreams, then, we're interested in the role of dreaming not in the limited biomedical sense of resolving issues with pathologized bodies, but rather in fostering metamorphosis and transformation through a return to ways of knowing and inhabiting the world, that have been in many ways foreclosed under post-industrial and secular society. This special edition seeks to understand how dreaming, myth, and ritual facilitate healing through a relation to the transcendent function in human beings. Authors are invited to reflect around the transcendent function from diverse cultural standpoints to more deeply appreciate how healing and liberation are conceived across diverse traditions through the interconnection of myth, dream, and symbol.
Topics may include, but are not limited to: ritual, myth, and dreaming in connection with healing and liberation practices, ancient and contemporary; dreaming in connection with the wisdom traditions; dreaming as a contemplative technology; understandings dreaming from first, second, and third person perspectives; the role of the symbolic in waking life; ancient and contemporary recognition of the ritualistic, symbolic dimensions in healing practices; dreaming from a Tibetan dream yoga perspective; dreaming in connection with indigenous cultural practices; lucid dreaming and contemporary dreaming technologies; dreaming and psychoanalysis; dreaming from an enactive standpoint.
Contact editor: Julien Tempone-Wiltshire
Deadline for submission: 31 January 2027
