The Mythopoeic Life

Dragons and people exist together—whether they know it or not.

Dragons and people exist together wherever we make myth. We do that every night when the brain puts us to sleep and dupes us into playing roles in dreams the brain scripts.

A life of making myth – the mythopoeic life – journeys with dragons.

Lord Dunsany dramatizes the mythopoeic life in “The Long Porter’s Tale” from his collection Tales of Wonder, published during the First World War:

Over these plains went Jones and over the Hills of Sneg, meeting at first unlikely things, and then incredible things, till he came to the long slope beyond the hills that leads up to the Edge of the World, and where, as all guidebooks tell, anything may happen. ... He saw the unicorns in their secret valley. Then night in a sinister way slipped over the sky, and there shone not only the stars, but lesser and greater moons, and he heard dragons rattling in the dark.

In his 1916 preface to this collection, Lord D writes from the barracks where he was recovering from a battlefield wound:

“…though we are all killed there will be songs again, but if we were to submit and so survive there could be neither songs nor dreams, nor any joyous free things any more.”

Of course, if the Kaiser’s Germany had won the War to End All Wars, songs and dreams would have continued. And they, too, would have sung of dragons – because there is a dragon at the base of every human brain … and it is dreaming us.