When Symbols Return: Learning as a Spinning Vortex
Friday 28 November 2025 at 06:14
Visible to anyone in the world
Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Friday 28 November 2025 at 10:40
I woke at 3:50 am today — the classic “dream retrieval hour” — compelled to scribble down a fragment of a dream before it evaporated like a puff of air between the bedclothes. I didn’t expect much from it—just another odd nocturnal vignette. But in working through it, something unexpectedly profound surfaced: a deeper pattern running through decades of my learning and thinking.
The dream itself was simple enough. I was driving my late father’s Rolls-Royce through the grounds of a grand boarding school. Pupils in 17th-century choir dress crossed my path, and I ended up in a chapel listening to a sermon delivered by a French priest whose words were unintelligible without the printed transcript he handed out — four pages of text interwoven with strange, symbolic illustrations that looked uncannily like they had stepped out of Jung’s Man and His Symbols.
At first, this seemed like nothing more than a nostalgic puzzle. But as I reflected on it — and as I often do, I analysed it through a mix of educational theory, Jungian psychology, and my own history — I realised that this dream had circled back to something fundamental: my innate need to think, learn, and communicate through symbols, diagrams, and spatial representation.
I’ve been doing this for decades without giving it a name.
At 14 or 15, I devoured 'Man and His Symbols' in the hope that it might help me decode my own inner world. At 17, I created a “love chart” — a hand-drawn graph using colours, axes and lines to represent the rise and fall of a teenage crush. During my MA in Education, I turned Yrjö Engeström’s activity system into a literal three-dimensional model using chess pieces and a long MDF shelf. Earlier, working on youth training projects in the 1990s, I distilled adolescent pathways into a visual system of shapes and colours: triangles, rectangles, squares — the geometry of possibility.
And today, in virtually everything I do — writing, coaching, study — I return instinctively to mind maps, diagrams, and illustrated conceptual maps. My thinking isn’t linear; it is spatial, illustrated, and associative. Ideas don’t arrive as sentences; they appear as shapes, patterns, flows, and nodes.
When I visualise learning, I see not a ladder or a roadmap but a slowly spinning vortex — a swirl of seemingly random inputs coalescing, merging, sometimes pulling apart again, until something suddenly crystallises and meaning becomes visible. It is dynamic, fluid, and alive.
This dream reminded me - that is how my mind actually works. And it always has.
Working through the dream didn’t just reveal old memories; it showed an old method — a deep symbolic grammar that has been helping me learn, analyse, and communicate since adolescence. I may have spent years trying to force myself into linear structures, essay formats, and tidy taxonomies, but my most authentic learning has always happened in images, diagrams, and shapes.
The Open University taught me — and continues to teach me — that there is no single correct way to learn. Each of our minds has its own architecture. Mine is geometric, symbolic, and visual. Someone else’s may be auditory, narrative, or experiential. The magic of adult learning is that we finally get to choose the approaches that fit us, not those we were pushed into at school.
So today’s early-morning dream has left me with a renewed appreciation of my own “symbolic mind”. Not something to tame, apologise for, or hide behind academic prose — but something to use consciously, proudly, and productively.
Fifteen years into blogging here, I still find that writing publicly helps me learn socially — and sharing this small insight back into the OU community feels like returning the favour. Perhaps some of you will recognise something of your own learning style in this:
The diagrams, the sketches, the swirling vortex of ideas that finally settle into clarity.
Sometimes it takes a dream to remind us how we learn. Right now, it sets me up to write fiction for the day, though my desire and instinct is to pick up where I left off 12 years ago to build on my knowledge and experience of learning. In 12 years, I've earned a further degree in history and completed a year of teacher training ... I can't let go.
When Symbols Return: Learning as a Spinning Vortex
I woke at 3:50 am today — the classic “dream retrieval hour” — compelled to scribble down a fragment of a dream before it evaporated like a puff of air between the bedclothes. I didn’t expect much from it—just another odd nocturnal vignette. But in working through it, something unexpectedly profound surfaced: a deeper pattern running through decades of my learning and thinking.
The dream itself was simple enough. I was driving my late father’s Rolls-Royce through the grounds of a grand boarding school. Pupils in 17th-century choir dress crossed my path, and I ended up in a chapel listening to a sermon delivered by a French priest whose words were unintelligible without the printed transcript he handed out — four pages of text interwoven with strange, symbolic illustrations that looked uncannily like they had stepped out of Jung’s Man and His Symbols.
At first, this seemed like nothing more than a nostalgic puzzle. But as I reflected on it — and as I often do, I analysed it through a mix of educational theory, Jungian psychology, and my own history — I realised that this dream had circled back to something fundamental: my innate need to think, learn, and communicate through symbols, diagrams, and spatial representation.
I’ve been doing this for decades without giving it a name.
At 14 or 15, I devoured 'Man and His Symbols' in the hope that it might help me decode my own inner world. At 17, I created a “love chart” — a hand-drawn graph using colours, axes and lines to represent the rise and fall of a teenage crush. During my MA in Education, I turned Yrjö Engeström’s activity system into a literal three-dimensional model using chess pieces and a long MDF shelf. Earlier, working on youth training projects in the 1990s, I distilled adolescent pathways into a visual system of shapes and colours: triangles, rectangles, squares — the geometry of possibility.
And today, in virtually everything I do — writing, coaching, study — I return instinctively to mind maps, diagrams, and illustrated conceptual maps. My thinking isn’t linear; it is spatial, illustrated, and associative. Ideas don’t arrive as sentences; they appear as shapes, patterns, flows, and nodes.
When I visualise learning, I see not a ladder or a roadmap but a slowly spinning vortex — a swirl of seemingly random inputs coalescing, merging, sometimes pulling apart again, until something suddenly crystallises and meaning becomes visible. It is dynamic, fluid, and alive.
This dream reminded me - that is how my mind actually works. And it always has.
Working through the dream didn’t just reveal old memories; it showed an old method — a deep symbolic grammar that has been helping me learn, analyse, and communicate since adolescence. I may have spent years trying to force myself into linear structures, essay formats, and tidy taxonomies, but my most authentic learning has always happened in images, diagrams, and shapes.
The Open University taught me — and continues to teach me — that there is no single correct way to learn. Each of our minds has its own architecture. Mine is geometric, symbolic, and visual. Someone else’s may be auditory, narrative, or experiential. The magic of adult learning is that we finally get to choose the approaches that fit us, not those we were pushed into at school.
So today’s early-morning dream has left me with a renewed appreciation of my own “symbolic mind”. Not something to tame, apologise for, or hide behind academic prose — but something to use consciously, proudly, and productively.
Fifteen years into blogging here, I still find that writing publicly helps me learn socially — and sharing this small insight back into the OU community feels like returning the favour. Perhaps some of you will recognise something of your own learning style in this:
The diagrams, the sketches, the swirling vortex of ideas that finally settle into clarity.
Sometimes it takes a dream to remind us how we learn. Right now, it sets me up to write fiction for the day, though my desire and instinct is to pick up where I left off 12 years ago to build on my knowledge and experience of learning. In 12 years, I've earned a further degree in history and completed a year of teacher training ... I can't let go.