Psychbot 2: Dream Walking and Becoming the Archetypal Hero

7 min readJun 6, 2024

This is the second post building out the concepts of Psychbot and the exponential self.

Click Here to read Psychbot 1: The Exponential Self

The Archetypal Hero Story

A prince named Ego saw a monster cloaked in darkness while moving through a vacant castle. As he scanned the deserted structure, he caught movement within. The scales of a winged snake-like monster reflected the faint light that penetrating broken windows. Even from the outside, the armor-clad prince could see a hoard of treasure guarded by the beast.

Two armies hunted the prince, and weren’t far behind. He had evaded them to this point. The compassionate queen, his mother, sought to bring him home and shield him from the great beast who had slain many before him and dragged his own father into the underworld. His corrupt step father, sought to enlist him to seek glory and spend his life serving another’s dream. The prince could not accept either path. To stand in the shadow of another would be to never become a king himself, but to be shielded from the terror of adventure would mean staying a perpetual child. He had to find his own way.

There was only one path for this hero to walk. Likewise, we must embody the same hero’s journey echoed throughout myth and fiction for thousands of years. We must go into the darkness and slay our monsters. Only then will we be able to assume the crown for our community and conquer the monsters of our collective dreams. Then, perhaps, we might save our father from the underworld bringing restoration to our society.

An Introduction to Dream Walking

I invite you into an adventure to become your highest ideal.

This series of essays and stories is about the highest achievements of the individual won through harnessing the hidden exponential currents inside and outside oneself.

Although I talk about the path to exponential success. I dare to hope that these essays will be more than a map to superficial wealth or fame. The culture you live in needs people who will voluntarily bear responsibility to find the meaning that comes with responsibilty.

This is a dragon you must slay to find the treasure of meaning in your life and earn that crown of responsibilty.

In seeking to deal with the whole person, I will include stories to engage the subconscious alongside the conscious. The subconscious dreams hidden narratives that you follow unconsciously through your waking hours. It expresses the complexity of the world in stories and emotional postures that move the deepest parts of you. The subconscious is the elephant that rationality perches atop as a rider. The rider believes he’s in control, until he attempts to steer the elephant only to find it has a will of its own. The subconscious often sets your reason’s direction without explicitly consulting the unsuspecting conscious self. The practical outworking is a hierarchy of values expressed through the actions you take.

These stories birthed in the underworld include the magic seeds that grow wisdom’s gardens.

I will discuss these gardens more later in this series.

The interplay between these deep symbols of dreams and the conscious toil under the sun can unlock the peak of self-actualization like a merely rational discussion on self improvement cannot. This is where you will find your pearl of great price worth selling all your possessions to obtain.

What is that treasure that resides in the monster’s den? Who are the people you will rescue and what transformation will you receive upon completing your journey? You will face many monsters before you gain your crown.

By merging narrative and rational discussion I seek to help bind back together the rational portions of our consciousness with that foundation of the unconscious that our psychology is built upon. This is what I call dream walking.

As Karl Jung observed, many psychological problems of modern man comes from the fracturing of our psychology and a repression our subconscious.

Into the Underworld

Before you discount narratives and fiction as menial or secondary to the rational, I propose a simple question: Do you know yourself?

I do not know me. The layers upon layers of abstraction that make up our conscious experience is built on the top of the catacombs of the subconscious that is often hidden from the conscious mind. We live by the words of long dead ancestors and dream in the symbols of primitive man.

We are complex.

Playing tug of war with this conscious, unconscious interplay within ourselves is a set of warring subpersonalities. Hunger, sexual desire, anger, and other spirits that are not simply a part of our ego or rational self. They’re sub-personalities that take hold of the machinery of the self even against my ego’s better judgement. This orchestra is sometimes conducted by our conscious self, but other times goes rogue. Perhaps the human mind is more like a jazz improv than a conductor leading a practiced orchestra.

Over centuries, our culture and shared unconscious have restrained the lower urges, and harmonized society around grand narratives that move us forward together through a sea of complexity that is baffling to consider. We have the result written into our psyche and stored in our cultural heritage through levels of abstraction and narratives that should be treasured and built upon. Our ideas and actions aren’t graded by some rational argument, but by the dynamic fitness function of the world that many and perhaps rightly so, personify as God.

Therefore, the lessons we’ve learned as a culture are the trial and error prototypes of metaphysical tools. They represent our best attempt to harmonize the complexity stack of physics, biology, psychology, and civilization. What we’ve achieved has taken more than 10,000 years of competing ideas in a Grand Arena of our shared unconscious to mold our metaphysical toolset around that always judging fitness function of the world.

Against this backdrop of unfathomable complexity, we, in our ignorance, reinterpret all the past according to the present. We have a one-sided conversation with titans of the past and place our interpretation of words into their mouths. Every word, when interrogated, has deep roots of context that can’t easily be plucked out of the time and place of its utterance.

What a strange and complex world we live in.

Our psyches are layered with 10,000+ years of abstraction in language and thought that’s taught to a child before the age of eighteen. The lessons of parents are implicitly handed down to children, then built upon in each generation creating a filter where useful ideas are brought forward to continue competing in that Grand Arena of our shared unconscious.

This has evolved into a collective unconscious where only the most fit sayings, writings, and stories stick over centuries because they’re useful. Even fewer perpetuate themselves over millennia. The oldest ideas don’t stick around because people are dumb or brainwashed, but because the ideas are useful to us as they were to our forefathers. Humans are metaphysical tool makers just as we are physical tool makers.

Pragmatism or usefulness judges the success of ideas in the real world by the practical use of them.

In our past century, geniuses in psychology have shined lights into the underworld beneath to bring the unconscious into conscious understanding. However, our ego’s tendency toward reductive, rational thinking and narrow perception is to the complexity of the world, like a child coloring a connect the dot game with crayons.

We have a handful of facts that we spread on a piece of paper, which is our limited working memory. Then, like a connect-the-dot game, we color lines between them with a crayon of rationalism to create a reductive picture of the world. Many mistake their crayon drawing for the actual terrain of the world.

Although reason is useful, it’s dangerous to mistake our crayon drawing of rationalism for the world’s actual terrain. Rationalism sees the world through a straw whereas unconscious symbols and archetypes see glimpses of the whole.

Why does this matter for self improvement? Self improvement and peak achievement are about aligning the whole person toward success. In other words, we must adapt ourselves to the judgements of that fitness function of the world adequately. The deepest parts of one’s self is not rational, but unconscious, deeply religious, primitive, and often separate from our willful choices.

Perhaps stories might catalyze the monster within and help integrate the shadow to transcend a merely rational discussion. Perhaps with hustle in the light of day and stories from the dreams of the night, we might transcend our ego and become that archetypal legend.

I invite you on a journey to slay monsters, and join Atlas in holding up the heavens while rooted, drawing water up from the depths of the Underworld.

My prayer is that you might become one of those exceptional titans who would join in rebuilding what’s been lost to us, to save our father from the darkness of the underworld, and leash the queen of monsters who again threatens us.

Check out the next article in this series where I delve into exponential forces of self improvement by clicking here: Psychbot 3: Becoming an Exponential (Click Here).

Psychbot 2: Dream Walking and Becoming the Archetypal Hero

The Archetypal Hero Story

An Introduction to Dream Walking

Into the Underworld

Written by Joseph Drups