Lever House and Laos, linked by a dream symbol

Carol Cassidy

On April 14, I was struck by the synchronicity of discovering that Carol Cassidy was here in New York, halfway around the world from where her traditional weaving company, Lao Textiles, is based in Vientiane. It was just a couple of weeks after I had first heard of Cassidy while reading online about Laos, which I was doing because I’d been contacted by someone based there, a friend of my late friend Nicole Carstens.

A Weaves of Cambodia weaver
(photos from Weaves of Cambodia)

Immediately after seeing the calendar listing on the 14th for Cassidy’s appearance at the Asia Society, I hurried into Manhattan to meet her. Later that day, I wrote a post about her and the “meaningful coincidence” I had experienced.

Unexploded land mine (Photo from CSHD)

That post included some information I learned about her after meeting her. The post mentions that Cassidy also runs a textile workshop in Cambodia, Weaves of Cambodia, which employs local residents who have had limbs amputated after being injured by land mines still buried in the countryside from the war in Vietnam and the Cambodian civil war.

A few days later, I emailed Carol Cassidy to tell her the post was up, and she replied on April 17 with this observation:

So much of our traditional weaving is animist imagery. They are complex designs and have layers of meaning. I have come to believe that many of the designs are graphic depictions of dreams, dreams shaped by beliefs and how the weaver interprets the universe. Most Lao see this world and the spirit world directly linked. I often refer to the complex brocade imagery, like the noble Siho or the agile climbing monkey that represent this link as “Woven Dreams.” Lao-Tai weaving is about as close to dream imagery in weaving as you can get. Creating these woven masterpieces, thread by thread has helped me understand the thoughts and beliefs of their creators.

Robbie Bosnak: true gold

The talk Sunday night by Dutch psychoanalyst Robert Bosnak (who’s now based in Australia) was greeted with enthusiasm for this renowned and gracious dreamwork pioneer. In the late 1970’s, Robbie pioneered a radically new method of dreamwork—embodied imagination—that incorporates aspects of Carl Jung’s technique of active imagination and insights from Jung’s studies of alchemy. Robbie’s book A Little Course in Dreams has been translated into twelve languages. In the late 1990s, Robbie and advanced nurse practitioner Jill Fischer in Connecticut pioneered dreamwork on the Internet, establishing Cyberdreamwork.com, via which dreamers in locations around the world engage in real-time dream-sharing groups via PalTalk. And now they both are part of a team establishing a healing sanctuary in Santa Barbara, California.

Nieuw Amsterdam drawing by Rev. Samuel Manning, from Wikipedia Commons

Scheduled to be a keynote speaker at the 2011 conference of the International Association for the Study of Dreams (IASD) in Kerkrade, Netherlands, in June, Robbie chose a topic for New York that links his homeland with this city that originated as a Dutch colony: “Nieuw Amsterdam and the Dream of the Golden Age: An Alchemical Perspective.” Though Robbie set the dream succinctly against the cultural heritage of the 17th-century Dutch Golden Age that helped spawn Holland’s New World colonization, the “dream of the golden age” in Robbie’s title was the culmination of a modern-day dream series. The dreams were incubated (requested of the dreaming mind before sleep), under Robbie’s direction, by a person he characterized as a financial expert dealing with the emotions and practicalities of the past three years’ turmoil in the financial world.

Robbie intends to publish his research with the dreamer in question, so best to leave it to him to get it into writing the sensitive dream text accurately. Descriptions of the dream imagery in this post will be limited mostly to the very general (sorry, folks!), but it was rich with metaphors that seem easily associated to the stock market of the past couple of years: metaphors for bloatedness, performance measures, lack of transparency, control and lack thereof, indifference by those in charge to how activity is directed, heart-stopping panic, and collapse. The Dutch historical perspective that Robbie recounted also seemed easily associated to modern times, in a history-repeats-itself way.