A Psychological Review of the Magic Kingdom in Disney World
Everything is fake and glamorous. We can’t help ourselves but feeling fascinated. On your right and left hand sides, a series of stores follows your way into the Magic Kingdom. The same repeated idea sold thousands of times in different shapes, colors and frames.
They say we don’t find money on trees, but here, for sure, who owns this makes money as easily as stretching one’s arm out and just grabbing it. It rains money here, like from heavy generous clouds that pour down their juice. Money.
The saint benediction, the marker of success in the Calvinist religious ideology is the countable result of God’s blessing upon you: money. God must has been extremely pleased over here, for His people have done the right job according to their financial status.
The Jungian psychology couldn’t agree more. All over the place people of any age follow the script, they looked like having fun, albeit the 30 minutes average wait to pull in each attractions, the sun, the crowd, and the inevitable confusion of a packed area. Faithfully, diligently, people come, download their salaries on bad expensive food, pay three times for a bottle of water (but you can choose a soda, which is cheaper) and follow the stream. They get out exhausted and happy. The entire place is filled with invisible mirrors that send them back the image most appreciates by all of us: our dreams.
They are not fools, they are seekers of dreams. All of them, like Donald Duck in the presentation show, forgot their own existential projects. Jung calls it “individuation process”: becoming who you are, which is bigger than what you know about yourself now.
We are born to accomplish something, being the material feats a consequence of the internal achievements. We are born to evolve and to unfold. That’s where dreams come from. What we are is part of a bigger project we are meant to develop and realize. Human beings are never done and the only thing that makes them move on are dreams. The aspiration for a new house, job and car are not Dreams. They may be the tip of a huge iceberg invisible to materialistic eyes, and this statement is proven when you observe what short distance this kind of dreams allow you to go, they give you little gas and don’t really fulfill the deep hunger of the soul.
External accomplishments are valid and powerful when anchored in internal roots. To obtain this, you must know thyself. Without the personal inner journey you can hear of feel the symptoms of the pained soul but not decipher them. Like a distracted parent you risk giving a bottle of beer to your inner baby instead of the breast the new you need to grow strong.
Frozen in that psychological status people permit their souls to be fed by external stereotyped images. “Listen to your heart”, “look for your dream” Mickey Mouse repeats over and over again. He’s the representative of the entire Magic Kingdom, the place that functions as the collective reminder that “dreams come true”.
But which dreams? Whose dreams?
The claim is universal but the answer is meaningful only if personalized and unique. A dream is each one’s own soul expressing itself. The dream is the individuation process your entirety is here to accomplish. Instead, the collective reminder works as a hypnotize master, counterbalancing its good contribution by its evil side. Out of focus and confused, people stick to the outside signals because they carry the distant echo of what they need. While waiting for the Aladdin cave to open up, in the darkness of the unconsciousness mind, people fill in the empty and hungry soul with the food, diversion and noise.
The seekers of their dreams go back home inebriated by fairy dust and empty pockets. They are done with their obligations and return to “normality”.
