And a Little Child Shall Lead Them

The title phrase occurs in a Biblical image of an idealized and longed-for era where the justice in the social order is symbolically reflected in the animal kingdom. The poetry is meant to extend images beyond common sense. The right order to be established portrays a time when the natural enmity between different species ceases and a place safe enough for a child to lead them.’ The vivid imagery of such a passage is reminiscent of dream imagery where truth is existential rather than factual. The poetry conveys the contrast of what is hoped for in a world where in reality the social order is not just and where there is danger for humans, especially for the most vulnerable of them, the child. This article is about a dream of great danger. It was dreamed by a nine-year-old girl who gives little more than the text of her dream. The interpreter is challenged to enter the experience of the dream and her own experience. As she considers it in relation to another story, a myth, she draws closer to an understanding of the danger portrayed in the world of the child. This phenomenological hermeneutic analysis establishes a dialogue between the dream, the myth, the interpreter, and the dreamer. It sets up a process that fuses the boundaries of each without blurring them. Thus the understanding of the dream, the myth, and the interpreter herself are expanded, and the world of the child is manifested in more depth. Human beings are dreamers and myth makers who must not only express their visions but also explicate their expressions. However, it is a peculiarity of western people that the last place they would look for explanations is in their dreams or in their children. It is also a peculiar ity of western people that they like to explicate things cognitively. In working with a dream or a myth we tend to want to ask the question “what does it mean?” The question suggests that the dream or the myth and the symbols with which it is said stand for or suggests something else, namely, the “real ” meaning. We are, unfortunately, tempted to think of the dream as a substitute for reality and of the dream symbols as fixed proxies or

Educational Leadership and Practices · Oral History, Memory, Narrative Analysis · Psychology · Themes in Literature Analysis · Geology

• Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences

  Open Access•Paul Ricoeur, John B Thompson•Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences•2016

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• The Pedagogical Atmosphere

  Open Access•Otto Friedrich Bollnow•Phenomenology + Pedagogy•1989

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