Note Details
- Stage: seed 🌱
- Type: note
- Topics: mythology storytelling
A seed note on Martin Shaw’s concept of co-mingling at the well of dreams — exploring the intersection of myth, imagination, and collective dreaming.
Martin Shaw is a British mythologist, storyteller, author, and teacher of wilderness rites of passage. His work draws on oral traditions from Celtic, European, and world mythology, weaving them into a contemporary practice of deep listening to the land and the psyche. Shaw has spent extended periods living in wilderness — including four years on Dartmoor — and his teaching consistently argues that myth is not a relic of the past but a living, breathing force that speaks to present crises of meaning, ecology, and identity.
“The well of dreams” in Shaw’s framework represents the deep imaginative commons that myth emerges from — a shared psychic reservoir where personal vision and collective story intermingle. To “co-mingle at the well” is to enter a state of receptive imagination: not fabricating stories from the ego, but descending into the older, wilder layers of consciousness where stories have been waiting. Shaw distinguishes between fantasy (which he sees as escapist) and genuine mythic imagination (which demands encounter with difficulty, shadow, and the non-human world).
This concept resonates with the broader idea that cultures in crisis are often cultures that have lost access to their mythic ground. Shaw’s work suggests that the retrieval of myth — not as nostalgia but as living practice — is essential to navigating the metacrisis, reconnecting with the more-than-human world, and recovering a sense of meaning that industrial modernity has eroded.