145 mph, awake and dreaming

The remnants of what was once a red Dodge Neon SRT is seen after the fiery crash… (Suffolk County Sheriff via the New York Daily News)

Just after midnight on Thursday (March 3), according to Suffolk County Police, two cars were drag racing at 145 mph on the Long Island Expressway. If you happened to be one of the drivers these two idiots were idiotically* passing and dodging in front of, your stomach would likely be balled up in fear for a week. I speak as a driver who’s been passed on the LIE by drag racers doing what I would guess is closing in on 100 mph. *(The original violated a principle I try to hold to: condemn the behavior, not the person.)

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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.

“Three Dutch Cups” dream

I’ve just finished (ca. 12:45 a.m.)  typing up this morning’s dream (1/29, that is), and in the process made a pretty obvious association I hadn’t thought of when I recorded the dream. It turns out to be  lovely association, and it aptly describes how I’m feeling about the talk by Dutch Jungian analyst Robert Bosnak that’s less than 24 hours away. A lot of people have been and will be pitching in to help, and even those who aren’t have given me a boost with their enthusiasm for this event.