The Nature of Dream Control: What Dreams are Made Of
The most important resource in a dream is your focused attention, but in order to properly utilize it, one muse first understand the environment you are using it in. To use a sports analogy, if attention is the ball, then the archetypal realm would be the field of play.
For the moment, never mind what an archetype is or what it is supposed to be. Let's break it down to it's most basic components, which are associations.
If I say the words "Wardrobe Malfunction", odds are your thoughts go right to "Janet Jackson". From this we can infer that association are formed between concepts and ideas. Surely, the concept of a wardrobe malfunction must have more than one association, but Janet Jackson is the first to come to mind. From this we can infer that these association have varying strengths, some are stronger than others.
So, we have (presumably countless) associations of varying strengths creating a tangled web, interlinking ideas and concepts. To give a better idea, the TV game show Family Feud follows this model. Contestants are presented with a concept, then compete trying to identify the strongest associations.
These associations come from somewhere and lead to somewhere. Each of these somewheres is a nexus point with countless associations, a street corner with a lot of options of it's own. Some are small foot paths, some are super highways. True travel in dreams consists in hopping from one nexus point to the other.
When we speak of archetypes, we are referring to small sections within that tangled mess of associations. It could be single nexus point, or a collection of several nexus points, which taken together still create a central location with a variety of associations leading outwards. If you take this custerfuck of associations as a whole, this is the entirety of your dream world. Travel does not take place by foot or by bar or by flying or by teleportation. You reposition your awareness within this maze of associations.
The default method of travel in dreams is a process I call "Archetypal Chaining". You focus on something in the dream (Visual or otherwise), which causes the root archetype of that "thing" to begin manifesting it's varied associations. Like pouring water into a bucket with a bunch of tubes leading from it. Eventually, one of those newly manifested things captures your attention and becomes the new dominant focal point. This new item in turn begins to manifest it's association until one of those captures your attention, and the cycle continues all night. It only seems like we have several different dreams, but once you begin to recognize the chaining process, you being to see how all your dreams are one long unbroken chain.
With lucidity, we can interrupt that chaining process and reposition our attention manually, or just take control of it and plot our own paths instead of following shiny objects around all night. Travel and control in dreams are all about learning to navigate your personal labyrinth of associations. Those of you with magical inclinations may even take it upon yourselves to try and untangle that mess, and re-engineer it with purpose.
