Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus by J.W. Turner, 1829
Yesterday morning I took a walk through fog-shrouded streets to my local train station.
Pausing at one of the ticket machines, I bought a one-way ticket to the first stop on the next departing train.
In that uniquely British form of name conventions, the destination is pronounced ‘win-dumm’.
The train was already on Platform 3, due to pull away ten minutes later. I knew where I was going. I was perfectly on time.
But yesterday, I did not scan my ticket and cross the barrier onto the platform.
Instead, I stood in silence on the concourse and then I watched as the 11:27 to Cambridge slowly came to life and slid away without me.
And then I turned around and walked home.
This is the eighth instalment in a very personal series of letters about a period of transformation and growth in my life.
You can read the rest of the letters here.
If you’ve been here since the beginning, you’ll know this started with a dream, a dream where I was given a choice: board the train to certainty or submit to the seductive but restorative potential of my creative anima.
And if you’ve followed the journey so far, you’ll know what choice I made.
The late psychotherapist Robert A. Johnson says that if we engage with our subconscious — either through our dreams or a process like Active Imagination — it is important to make whatever lessons or insights we glean from that realm manifest here in the four-dimensional world of physical matter. (Thank you Steph for the recommendation!)
This could be a change to your behaviour or habits, or it could be a performative ritual of some kind: “a symbolic act that brings home the meaning of the dream in a powerful way”:
“Any physical ritual will serve if it affirms the message of your dream…even small acts have the power to make your dream concrete and to begin its integration into your conscious life.”
Robert A. Johnson
For millennia, rites and rituals have been a way for people to perform myth: to bring its subconscious energy down here to earth and make the meaning real in our bodies.
Historically, most cultures developed elaborate rites of passage to matriculate children into adulthood - some of which were, frankly, terrifying. But, as Joseph Campbell frequently lamented, we’ve all but abandoned rituals in the modern world and replaced them with…nothing. If he were alive today, he’d probably see the result of that in all the middle-aged millennials who still collect action figures.
However, the absence of public rituals doesn’t mean we can’t create and perform private ones – and there’s no reason you can’t get creative with them!
Johnson describes a patient who, after realising that a series of vivid dreams were warning him that he was wasting his time on junk food and other cheap distractions, bought a McDonald’s meal and then buried it in his backyard in a solemn ceremony.
✹
2025 has been the hardest year and I am so grateful for all of it. I have touched earth and sky — I have never wept so much, nor have I looked up and said “thank you, thank you, thank you” so much either.
I’ve rarely felt more alive!
So, as this most remarkable, painful, joyful year draws to a close, I wanted to do something solemn and serious that acknowledged and affirmed the message in the dream.
Standing on the concourse, with scores of harried people streaming past either side of me, I stared at the train and I imagined the older version of myself — confused and scared, too eager to please others, still bruised by traumas long past and losing himself to a life that wasn’t his — getting on board.
I took a deep breath and, exhaling, hurried that old version of me on his way.
I hope he enjoys Wymondham, whatever is there! But me, I did not get on the train.
I walked out of the station and slipped back into the fog.
Until another Sunday soon,
