The first patient I am presenting is Melanie whom I introduced in my essay “Risk The Ocean”. She is in her 30’s, a Harvard graduate and currently teaching at an Ivy League school.

The dream I want to talk about is one of several dreams she had this particular night. The background has to do with her entertaining her parents who had just returned from a European vacation. The patient is currently in pre-production on her new film project while she is on a sabbatical from her university.

The gist of her concern was the humiliation she felt when her mother told her of a conversation she had with her secretary, in which they both criticized the patient’s choice of boyfriend. This humiliation was made worse because her mother related the story in front of three of the patient’s college students. (The students were interns on her movie project.) In short, it was a heedless, brutal attack on the patient.

I am choosing this dream because it contains a subject that needs to be brought to everyone’s awareness.

DREAM

I am standing behind my high school friend, Keli'i. We’re both from Hawaii, but Keli'i now lives in Chicago. His back is towards me, and he’s not wearing a shirt. He is overweight. I am holding a large pair of scissors in my hand. Keli'i implores me to cut the fat off of his body. I can’t bring myself to do it.

After telling me this dream I asked, "Who is this person Keli'i?"

Patient: I went to school with him. He is so very effeminate, flamboyantly gay, yet he is married and has a son. Keli'i is native born Hawaiian with about a quarter Chinese. He went to the same prep school, called Punahou, where Mr. Obama also attended as a young man.

Keli'i was not happy with himself there or really anywhere. He went to an Ivy League school where, I was surprised to learn, he met and married an African-American woman. She also got her MBA from another Ivy League school and then landed a job with a famous company like Morgan Stanley. You know, one of those Wall Street giants. I don't know exactly which. Now I have the feeling that she may have been let go since the economic collapse.

Dr. B: Where are they now?

Patient: I don't know. Maybe Chicago. I think Keli’i lost his job too.

Dr. B: So they would be living with her parents?

Patient: Yeah. (silent) Both Keli’I and I experimented with drugs during our college years, but I gave all that up. He didn't.

Dr. B: What does his name mean?

Patient: It basically means “chief” in Hawaiian.[1] There is an old story

about an ancient Hawaiian chief, Liloa, who had a son, Umi, by his union with a commoner. The woman later married a fisherman. One day her husband wanted to punish the boy and raised his hand to strike him. The mother cried out to stop him and revealed that Umi was of royal blood. (In Hawaii if you hit a chief you are condemned to die.) Hawaiian chiefs were thought to have access to “mana” (spiritual power) and were therefore incorruptible leaders deserving of the utmost respect.

Dr. B: What about the scissors?

Patient: They remind me of cutting a film, that is, editing a story. You do have to be careful. You can easily butcher a film if you don't cut it correctly.

Dr. B: You mention K's wife is African-American. Mr.Obama is African-American, and he and his wife are both from Chicago. There must be some deeper significance in that link with K, whose name indicates that he is a chief.

Patient: K and his wife are both Ivy League graduates like Michelle and Mr. Obama. I don't really know what Mr. Obama has to do with it. I am really pissed off at my mother for what she has done, however unwittingly. Still, I am mad as hell about it.

Dr. B: What did your mother do?

Patient: She told me she went to her school and talked to the secretary there who is a good friend of hers. She told this woman, “My daughter has a very serious boyfriend. There is only one problem.” The secretary asked her what that was and mother said, “Her serious boyfriend is about fifteen years older than she is.” My mother went into detail, saying that the secretary put her hand on her arm as if in consolation. Then Mom said, “I told her who the boyfriend was and when I mentioned his name the secretary’s eyes lit up as if to say ‘what is the problem?’.” The boyfriend is the father of a very famous celebrity. Because this is the celebration of a celebrity, that makes everything all right. Now get this, Dr. Bail, my mother comes and repeats this story word for word in front of me and my three students. While she is talking, I’m thinking “I didn’t do it right again. Why can’t I get it right? Why can’t I do something to get this woman to love me?” And while she is talking, I am totally embarrassed. My students are transfixed by the story and the point of the story is that I don’t matter. In fact, I have never mattered to her. However, my boyfriend who happens to be the father of a movie star makes it all right.

Dr. B: Understandably I see why you are very mad. Secondarily I wonder, too, if you are not mad at Mr. Obama, unknowingly, who is our chief, who is ignoring the promises made implicitly to his "children". I think the idea here is to cut away the "fat" in order for K to liberate the true chief that resides within him. It is what a sculptor does, like Michelangelo. You actually see him liberating the man in his piece called "The Captive" in the grip of the marble. To liberate the true chief is to give him the qualities of remembering to care for the people and to make good on the promises he made.

Ultimately it has to be understood that the chief we are talking about on the individual particular level is your mother.

POSTSCRIPT

The patient related to me afterwards about how she got into a lecture mood with her students and talked to them about world events and the need for awareness and change. Afterwards, she asked her students what they thought. They answered, one by one, that they felt it didn't matter. That nothing ever changes anyway, so why bother getting worked up about it. Mind you, these are students at a prestigious Ivy League school and they feel "screwed". They feel that good courses with appropriate learning are being denied them. They are being taught courses that seem to be repetitive year after year. And the world doesn’t seem to offer any inspiration. It's all of no use to anybody and all three agreed they were just "screwed". Imagine being about 22 years-old and even before they have lived a decent amount of time post school they already feel "screwed".

Oh, Albert Camus, where are you?

It might be interesting to the reader what the patient herself wrote about this session:

PATIENT ASSOCIATIONS

Keli’i is a truncated form of Ke ali’i, which means “the chief” in Hawaiian. Keli’i was my only Hawaiian friend in high school. He was always self-conscious about his weight and constantly battled with his body image. Keli’i went to an Ivy League school where he met his future wife, who is African-American and from Chicago. As a filmmaker now making a film in my home state of Hawaii, I wonder if this dream has to do with my responsibility towards my subject matter. Scissors remind me of cutting film, in other words, editing together a story; sometimes one butchers the subject matter if one is not careful. But the dream doesn’t seem to be about this. Dr. Bail asks me what other Chief lives in Chicago, and I immediately reply, “Obama.” President Obama actually went to the same prep school Keli’i and I attended, Punahou School. Moreover, the First Lady, like Keli’i's wife, is an Ivy Leaguer from Chicago. Dr. Bail points out that by asking me to cut the fat off his body, the Commander-in-Chief is asking me to help him get rid of all the layers of old thinking, old politics – in short, the “fatty deposits” of the old paradigm that stifle our awareness of the unconscious. When these are removed, the Chief will be able to lead effectively and I, too, have to rid myself of mine.

COMMENTS

I stop here to comment on the dream of the patient in Hawaii. The image of Keli'i the chief shows us the prison in which man is kept, illustrated as I said by Michelangelo's sculpture, “The Captive”. This is symbolic of mankind - the marble encasing the man - representing the invisible chains that thrust us into a state of inertia. The masses of mankind find themselves engaged in servile slavery with undo reverence to their masters. Yet we know and do not know that our masters as actually quite like us. They piss like us and shit like us and get sick like us. Their fine clothes, fine jewelry, their snobbish alliances which they erect and want us to erect, is an illusion. However, this illusion is as strong as the marble encasing man in the agony of trying to free himself. We must work toward not only freeing ourselves but toward freeing them.

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PATIENT INTRODUCTION

This second part of this essay concerns the old man (see essay “Venice Beach”) who came to get some relief from his fears about dying. Strangely, to him, he is no longer morbidly occupied with scenarios of his death. These seem to have all gone away.

He now has taken a great interest in the affairs of the day; politics, the sex scandals of the Republican party. He laughs about their hypocrisy. He jeers at the press that doesn't call a certain governor to the issues that he raises. The patient claims that this particular governor found his soul mate. If so, then why would he not give up every other less important thing in his life including trying to work on his marriage? It is ridiculous. Is marriage a business contract that one has to live up to its terms? Isn't that teaching the young of the world the stupidity of Christian teachings - if indeed they really are? He thought the most important thing in life was love. He was disgusted that as far as he knew no one had ever said it simply to the American public.

He was concerned with the politics in Iran and the stupidity of the governing enclave that doesn't seem to have learned anything from history. But he added no government seems to learn anything from history. He then concluded our country has not learned either and we are deeply on a course that will collapse. He is equally disgusted with Mr. Obama for favoring the banks and Wall Street, giving them really a carte blanc, so to speak. Mr.Obama he feels has continually betrayed the people, with the health issue which is being heavily propagandized negatively. If America

indeed is so smart, can't we figure out a scheme to insure everyone? There is money enough because it seems there is money enough to fund another war, maintain over 150 bases around the world, fund the banking system and lastly he is disappointed in Mr. Obama's tepid response to the gay community. He gives this community small comfort with pleas of let us wait. Unfortunately in the waiting people die. Soldiers die even on the transfer of power from the Americans to the Iraqis.

As the old man spoke, I recalled a dream another patient had. This was from the commercial photographer who we met in the essay "Roundabout".

DREAM

The patient sees President and Mrs. Obama. They were puzzled by their baby. The baby was lost or switched.

At this time the patient was in another state staying with a good friend who knew about Obama in Chicago and the charity work he did. What he noticed was that Obama loved being in all the pictures. He loved the camera being pointed at him. I told the patient he was dreaming of the baby that represented the future for the good of all the people in America and this baby was switched or lost. How true.

All of us must wait for further developments and ask ourselves, "Will he ever get that baby back?"

The old man has a lot on his mind and years of his own experiences to put into the mix. So this day he said, "This is my dream and I haven't a clue about it".

DREAM

In my dream I am in the movie. It has not changed. The doctor and a woman are faced with a choice. The homosexual problem and the lesbian problem. Though it seemed at the start something was going to be shown. It was like - living. All the characters in the movie or the play of it. The director let it roll to find out whether the meaning of the game through it had about is. What I see is the young girl in the movie and the director.

Patient: I am sorry it is so garbled. But I am presenting it as I remember it.

Dr. B: The movie is one's life script and it has not changed. I am taking your first statement as your association. Life's script must change for humanity as it must for anyone who comes here. The awareness of who they are in the dream and the problem you seem to state is that of the homosexual and the lesbian so let's look more into that. But let me ask you what you think about homosexuality?

Patient: My experience is like so many others. I have lived in my business with many lesbians and homosexuals. I like many of them, I don't like some of them, much like I do other people and what they do sexually is not my business and I see no reason to make it my business.

Dr. B: So symbolically, as I understand your comment, if one is man to man or woman with woman they are not in polarity - not integrating the conscious and the unconscious, not integrating the field of the force and field of the form. Since it is still happening, it does not allow for the evolution of the change that is called for which is to come into union. These people are still bringing to humanity their plight. We are still living separately, not integrating the unconscious and the conscious, not integrating our masculine and our feminine. We are staying in separation.

Integration and balance are requisite to attaining a supernal consciousness.

They are the representation of the reflection of the whole of humanity in that their evolution is being impeded by this kind of union. They are showing us a reflection of the governmental system which is a reflection of what is happening to us internally.

So these gay individuals are part of the soul correction that says, "All right, I will participate in revealing to humanity the condition called separation. Humanity has to come to their wholeness to be able to recognize the beautiful energy of union. The evolution of union is now."

The dream continues.

DREAM

At a meeting there was a display of an angel. I was one of its wings. There was not enough room. I asked a woman to be the wing and I would be the body. She had the same problem. The people there were shocked at what they were seeing and hearing and at one point a woman was talking to me excitedly. She knew I knew the answer. The room was quiet and expectant. That was OK. There was an excitement about revealing spirituality. A lesbian analyst asked how I could run the meeting. I said read Dr. Bail's essays.

Dr. B: I think you feel in the last part that you must help in the spreading of these ideas. It's what you were hinting at the beginning when saying everything is boringly the same. Let me try to explain the meaning of the first part. When you are the wing, the room is too small. You think to solve that you will be the body, but the woman has the same problem. Now here is the astonishing part. We are not simply a portion of the angelic consciousness. We are all the angels. In this essence if you move to the body, there is the hope of there being more room in the body. The core center becomes the consciousness. When I offer these interpretations the room does get quiet and relief comes. Man must learn they are not the wings of the angel. They must seek the center core and know they are angels.

The patient goes on....

This happened in my grandmother's home. That was a very, very long time ago.

DREAM

A famous black entertainer wanted to rescue the congressman. It was scary. It was a battleground. The congressman was also a black man. To my surprise it all turned out OK. No one hurt or killed.

Dr. B: So you are in the grandmother's home? What must be spoken are the words of spirit for the hurt not to occur or that no one should die. Again the black man is the ignorance of humanity. It's in the dark and yet the rescuer is another black man. There is awareness that comes into the darkness. That is the key factor. There is the knowledge of the unconscious. The conscious mind must be the initiator to seek the knowledge. And one more possible piece of information. One can only guess is the black man who rescues really President Obama and will this be the result of a transformation in him?

Patient: Makes sense. There is one more dream but it seemed as if I were awake.

DREAM

It is about the politics of the Middle East. The apparent insolubility of the problem, its frustration, the endless lies going back and forth, a lot about democracy, problems. And justice was the answer in the dream.

The patient continues.

Lies endlessly and history is the same. At the end I say to a man, "We can dance here in this ballroom." And we do. I am very agile and dance very nimbly.

Dr. B: History is endless but it can be changed but only inwardly, from within. Anyone who lies to himself and to others is contributing to the government that must continue to lie to its people. Humanity must change their ability to tell their own truth to themselves as well as to others, but first of all to oneself and then outward. Your dancing signifies your liberation, your ability to free yourself from history. The man represents external reality, the kind you speak about in your dream. This is the dream of the conscious and the unconscious.

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PATIENT INTRODUCTION

Dr. D is the third patient about whom I will talk. His history can be derived from previous essays such as “Why Dr. Dombrowski Doesn’t Have A Life” and “The Prodigal Son”. He has read my new essay "The Long Road Home". He opens the session with....

Patient: Dr. Bail, first I have to disagree with your statement about insurance companies. I have had nothing but good results. I grant you HMO's are awful but for the rest I agree with their policies and further I am a scientist and I absolutely believe in your imprinting theory. It has saved my life and has put many questions I have had about life, and that no one had ever answered before, right in order. In addition I don't know about these numbers in the Tarot. It sounds like magic or fortune telling.

Dr. B: I have no wish to argue with you or anyone about these issues. I am putting my information out. What you can use, use and what you can't, discard. So what about your dream?

Patient: I did have this dream.

DREAM

I am in a room, which is white (walls, ceiling and floor) and has long desks with computers and work chairs. It appears to be some sort of place of learning. I have a cordial glass of a red liqueur in my right hand. I am sitting at one of the chairs near one of the long desks or worktables. Abruptly three young men come into the room. They are loud and somewhat boisterous and one sits down on the same chair I am in causing me to be jolted to the right with my buttocks supported by only half the chair and also to spill half my drink. I think to myself, “These young men are gay," but I like the company of gay people because they tend to be educated, witty, energetic and aware of the arts and interested in them. Just then the scene changes and I am looking down to my right at a beautiful naked woman, but I see only her head, face and left breast due to my angle of view. I have a full cordial glass of the red liqueur in my right hand. The woman appears to be fully naked and in a state of peaceful repose. I mentally fret a bit because from this angle I do not see her full naked body but make no move to change my angle of view so I can view it.

Dr. B: So what do you think?

Patient: I have no bias against homosexuals. I have never had a wish to be with a man but I do like them. Doctors seem dull and ignorant compared to them, and I speak generally. They are cultured and interesting.

Besides you know I planned to put my pictures in a gallery in West Los Angeles owned by a gay man. I intend to advertise in this magazine that many gay people buy. I think it will be a good investment. That whole population is more apt to buy my pictures.

Dr. B: So what about this fellow?

Patient: I was not mad at him. He just sat down and pushed me out of occupying my seat to where I was on it only halfway. At least half my drink spilled. I was not mad. I don't know why he did that. I do like a drink but I am careful not to exceed my limit. You know my history about drinking.

Dr. B: And tell me about the pictures.

Patient: I have taken many pictures of flowers and the parts of flowers at a very high magnification. I have quite a few of great artistic quality that I made with R as the nude intermingled with my pictures. She is not entirely nude, only partially. In fact it is that one that the gallery owner wanted to show plus a few others of like nature.

I stopped seeing R because she was becoming drunk in my house. It began to be no fun. She was a beautiful girl with a beautiful body - for sale I think. In the end I could not go on with her. It was becoming too dangerous especially with my history of self-destructive behavior.

Dr. B: If the gay man pushed you off your seat, I think this is a way of showing that you are not sufficiently integrated, not balanced. I do not think it has to do with you being gay but more as an indicator of imbalance - of separation. Likewise R is an example of a beautiful woman who, as you say, may be for sale. She represents not the highest quality of the feminine, not the highest standard.

It is a fact that you never had a time in your life when you had a great girlfriend, one that you might want to marry. Your marriages were rushes to your own self-destruction and, even when it was shown to you that is what they were, you remained.

So, in summary, the wine that is knocked out of the glass could be said to be the wine of your life, signifying the good life knocked out and lost because of the essential imbalance and, therefore, lack of integration. This is something we must begin to look at more closely.

Again, I think it might be interesting to the reader to see how the patient abstracted the session.

PATIENT INTERPRETATION

I identified the white room with computers as the analysis and Dr. Bail agreed. He went on to say that the gay men represented sameness or lack of polarity and that without polarity there can be no evolution. I took this to mean that this was a representation of my mental state and that I was in

some way resisting polarity and evolution and that it was holding me back. The alcoholic drink in my hand, according to Dr. Bail was a way of saying that my mental state was somehow addled, another way in which I was holding myself back. In my associations, the pose in which the naked woman was pictured reminded me of a picture I had once taken of R, a beautiful girl and I suspect a high priced call girl with whom I had recently had a one and a half year relationship which was part friendship and part call girl/client). Dr. Bail said that showed that I was still not able to have a relationship with a woman, which was more than this had been – using her sexually in return for favors (in money and other ways) I would do for her. I acknowledged that this was true, since I still know no more of what Dr. Bail calls ‘love’ than a blind man knows of color.

COMMENTARY

We must begin at the reality of Source consciousness. Source abides in its wholeness and begins to exchange its self-consciousness to recognize its individual components, the qualities of itself: the light, the sunlight, the moonlight, the nightlight, the inner consciousness, the outer consciousness, the beauty of the Source consciousness exploring all other qualities whether its joyfulness or sorrow, whether its an activity in a human body or an animal body, or the galactic body; all to know itself in all these components all of which provide the vibration called evolution.

Evolution began with the "big bang" 13.6 billion years ago and when evolution began the polarities began for there was light and dark, cold and heat. There was positive and negative as in the hydrogen atom and a whole sequence of further polarities grew as the universe expanded.

Evolution in itself contains polarity, a separation that is an active component and a receptive component, in order to look back upon itself. And so indeed there is a Source level or center that created the greatness of separation. In the process of evolution the separation came to its nadir, its completion, and now the quality of union is occurring.

Now that we are in the great sweep of union, it is natural to understand that after millions of years of separation initiated by Source itself, union cannot easily or quickly come about. Here the great law of inertia prevails. Some will do it faster and some slower and some not at all in perceptible time. But the trend, the force field today, and by today I mean hundreds of years in the past extending to hundreds of years in the future, is ultimately that where we are going is towards union. With this as a backdrop, we may be a bit kinder to President Obama's seemingly snails pace to make good his promises. There is a battle he will have to wage within himself. However, we can help the process by our own advancing and making the advancement a great force, which will impress the Congress and all branches of our government to march forward to include all the people and in this endeavor it will not be lost to humanity at large. The realization will prevail that all of us are connected as being part of Source consciousness. Perhaps then it will be seen as utterly ridiculous the stupidities of war, our own civil unrest, our competition to vanquish who and what we see as our competitor. But when we look to our left and our right we will be able to see another spoke of the wheel. There is no competition between spooks of the wheel, the center of which is Source. In summary from this point of view there was a time of involution and separation and the evolution allowing the reunion to occur.

Finally involution still goes on where Source feels it necessary to go on but reunion is the greater force field going on currently.

ADDENDUM

The following dream of a fourth patient, whom I will call Emily, necessitated the writing of this addendum. The patient is a 55 year old woman, an architect by profession who studied in Los Angeles, Rome and Barcelona. She currently has a job with a prestigious firm in Los Angeles.

She is currently unmarried but has been and is very occupied with current events not only in America but the world. She is partly of Asian extraction. She came to psychoanalysis for reasons of general unhappiness. Currently there are no men in her life. She is not unhappy about this. She feels this interlude is giving her a rest for the next part of her life. She has this dream and it surprises her.

DREAM

I am in a room, I don’t know where, with President Obama. He is looking out the window in a state of reverie motionless. There is a huge python in the room (she had recently read about a couple who had a python pet which had strangled their two year old child). She imagined that scene and shuttered.

I see the python slide across the floor and go up Obama’s back. It opens its mouth as if to begin to swallow him. It cannot. I yell to a worker, “Quick. Go get a hammer.” I see the snake slide back slowly. As it does it bites Obama on the neck. It slithers away and out. I help to chase it away. Obama remains in his reverie. The man comes back with a fish. He says, “This kind of snake likes this kind of fish”, and the dream ends. I wake remembering the dream very clearly. It was very frightening to me.

I said to her that the snake represents transformation and the fish – that familiar symbol – represents wisdom. We are left in this dream with only the bite that the snake makes on Obama’s neck but he is still in reverie.

Patient: It sure is. (she continues) Yeah, and the dream ends, I forgot to tell you, with many little snakes inching their way into the room and across it.

Dr. B: Maybe there is some hope. In summary what the dream is saying is that wisdom is needed before there can be a transformation. That goes not only for you but for all of us and all of us includes member of Congress and President Obama as well. The dream is also saying that you, like everyone else, are frightened of huge transformations. Little ones can be accommodated with wisdom. This is true for everyone, even the chief. To complete the dream, I would say that the worker you sent out to get the hammer, presumably to kill the python, and comes back with a fish to feed the python is probably me standing for the interpretations I give you.

Patient: You know, Dr. Bail, I thought this work would be easy to do. I have had some therapy in the past but this is the hardest work I have ever had to do.

COMMENTARY

I think in President Obama’s heart center is a great desire to balance and come to the fruition of his promises so all of us have to be patient.

We call on everyone to remind our Chief that he must remain awake to his promises, that he must not be dulled by us remaining in our dullness, that he must remember his sacredness and continue to vibrate the light of that higher truth.

Each of us must participate to attain our higher truth and ignite the beauty of the sacred light within ourselves. We must continue to expand the light in all of our communities throughout our country, therefore our countrymen, therefore our Chief.

July 2009

[1] * Kamehameha I, referred to as Kamehameha the Great, is remembered most for unifying the islands during his rule from 1795 – 1819.

* King Kamehameha III (1825 -1854) spoke the words which were to become Hawaii’s state motto: “Ua mau ke ea o ka aina i ka pono”, translated to mean: The life of the land is perpetuated in righteousness. (Sounds like the old testament)