This patient is a person who decided to come back into psychoanalysis after a period of years on the verge of a moderately serious medical problem. This is his dream after the danger was past.

DREAM

I am standing on the dais of a large church or cathedral. I seemed to be dressed in a white toga and I am holding a very young infant or child, who is blond in hair and fair complexioned. The baby is also dressed in white, like a little toga or white gown for a baby. The room is filled to capacity with sitting and standing people of mixed sexes. All seem to be watching transfixed as I am talking with the baby and, at the same time, telling the audience what the baby is saying. The hall is stone quiet and the attention is intense and no sound ushers forth from the collection of individuals who are gathered. It is as though something profound is to be heard or experienced by all.

ASSOCIATIONS

Cathedral – Christmas time in France, Spain or Italy. White toga or gown – like the pope wears. Baby seems to bring forth the idea of the Christ child, though fair blond, unlike the story of Jesus, dark and dark-haired.

Cathedral – also the Dr. Bion talk in Los Angeles in 1974 at a Beverly Hills High School auditorium which was packed to capacity with an audience wanting to hear what he had to say. Although, at that time, I remember that the conditions were such by pro-speakers that Bion was all but kept from saying anything.

I could not understand why I would be the action figure in such a story.

UNDERSTANDING

I was identified with Dr. Bail, who was giving a message to the population – a very important message, which he has gleaned from his years of analytic work. That message is that the baby comes and communicates in unconditional love and it cannot be intellectually communicated or understood. It is a pure sensual experience. The civilization, according to the dream, is ready and wants desperately to hear this message and Dr. Bail is delivering this message, almost at the proper time of the season of Jesus, for all to hear.

After the dream, though not a dream, I had the heaviest feeling that all of the people around me, perhaps save my own family, were in desperate pain and agony and there seemed to be no respite for them. It was almost overwhelming and brought me to tears in receipt of this “human condition”.

COMMENTARY

Freud never tackled the problem of religion or spirituality and psychoanalysis has, in a very great way, avoided the topic as well. There is currently one seminar at the American Psychoanalytic Association meetings, chaired by Dr. Paula Hamm, on spirituality. It is usually well attended but it is noticeably not an integrated part of any analytic education.

In fact it seems that integration is a hard word to use in the same sentence with the field of psychoanalysis. This is a time when analytic roots are quite divergent not only in the American Psychoanalytic Association but in Europe as well. Classical analysis has been given up by a great many analysts who do not believe it can deliver, in terms of its paradigm, what it purports to deliver; all this, according to Dr. Morris Eagle, a respected clinician and researcher in the history and development of psychoanalysis especially in the American Psychoanalytic Association and the world at large, specifically Europe. The problem is how does one understand the dream such as the patient presents. It does not fall within the purview of existing analytic theory for the reason that analytic theory does not consider spiritual phenomenon.

A serious glance at the world today reveals “an age” (wasn’t it always “an age”) when people celebrate something or someone they idolize; for example the American dream or someone like Madonna and Lady Gaga. Everyone can mention a long list of entertainers whose star has risen, shone briefly and then receded so that new stars can take their place. Not only are such popular entertainers celebrated but there are also the supreme singers like Placido Domingo, the Beatles, Elvis Presley, The Grateful Dead and so on. And finally there are the royal families in some few countries that also enjoy this privilege.

It is clear to me that human beings need to celebrate someone. We have our family who we may idealize, but at a certain age it is not “cool”, in modern jargon, to betray that idealization of one’s mother or father. We move on. Those we choose to idealize are picked for talent, for beauty, for super excellence, for charisma and millions join their particular movement. It speaks of a great inner need to have this kind of external attraction and devotion.

I think this is a coarse version of a spiritual need we all have.

I think all of these idolatries are a shifting away, a displacement of what once was – when mankind was young – a devotion and a joy that man had for the Divine. When early man worshiped a tree, a rock or an animal, it was an acknowledgement that these things were a manifestation of divinity.

Some people never forgot the true object that is the Divine. There were singular men and women who had the great gift to directly contact Divine essence; for example St. Francis and the female saints mentioned in the history of the church or our Native Americans and the history of their worship of Manitou.

Over thousands of years our civilization has become unrefined and mankind has given itself permission to abuse his fellow man, woman and child. This abuse has added to the baggage every person carries in his/her unconscious.

I feel that we do not understand that when horrors are perpetrated it will affect everybody, not just the country in which they are executed. The effect will be to enter the unconscious of mankind; since everyone’s unconscious is in touch with everyone else’s all of us suffer such trauma. It permeates every part of our being and will end up in the ova of women and become part of the imprint that women unconsciously project onto their newborns.

It is the egg of women that carries her imprint, her own particular history as well as the history of the age, the history of its turbulence and the terror of its time.

It is ironic that governments try to establish healthcare systems, whatever the nature of that system is, and yet the same governments that provide this great aid to its people also provokes the conditions for the people to become ill. Governments may complain about the cost of healthcare. They do not realize their actions of violence and consequent aggrandizement weakens a population not only financially but morally, physically and emotionally. Stress weakens us and induces all kinds of illness to come and finish us.

This patient’s dream is a rendering of a person who has transcended a misfortune satisfactorily. Though of the Jewish faith, he stands at the altar of a grand cathedral and has this exalted and painful experience as he holds up the Christ child whose sole lesson to mankind was love – love each other. It is noteworthy that as he holds the child up, he experiences the awe that the people of the cathedral are likewise feeling. We are indeed brothers and sisters in another realm. We are all angels come to do our trial in this incarnated form.

It must be the patient’s ‘high’ self, which is in contact with Divine essence. A lot of work has to happen to cleanse the psyche of not only the imprint but the consequences of the imprint for that mark leads one on many wrong roads. Wrong roads mean many mistakes, all of which end up weighing the patient, aging them and, depending on the imprint, causing them to fall physically or emotionally ill.

I have seen spiritual dreams from patients who are beset, almost drowning, by their problems and whose lives are so stricken that only thoughts of suicide come to their minds. At times like these there can be dreams in which the ‘high’ self surfaces to contact Divine mind, which offers support and solutions. Recently the patient dreamt his insurance agent is speaking to him and giving him some pamphlets. “You can sell them and make $6 profit,” the agent says. The patient opens the pamphlet and sees the Hebrew alphabet. He can make out several letters, as he once studied Hebrew for his Bar Mitzvah. He reels off those that he remembers; Daleth, Lamed, Yod, Hay. His associations are to the Kabala and to the Zohar, an ancient mystic writing contacting divinity. He says Zohar claims you can read it and even if you do not understand, your unconscious does. He did not know the meaning of six. He talks and details how his real insurance would pay a great deal of the costs of his illness.

In the end it came to my saying, “The six in the Tarot is the Lovers card. That is the law of union. It means union with the Divine. And the letters also have to do with being in contact with the Divine. For example, Daleth is the door that one must open and Hay has to do with the eye of the Divine, and you hope that it shines upon yourself, and Yod stands for the hands of the Divine.”

Finally I say to him that the best insurance is the one that comes from the Divine, it comes from being in union with the Divine, with Spirit. There is then no need to fear.

Another patient, Dr. Dombrowski, has strewn throughout his dreams experiences of ecstasy in the presence of Spirit. Recently he dreamt of being in a rowboat with his feet in the water. Suddenly he felt a great joy sweep through him and he cried as he told me his dream. I reminded him of other dreams of such Divine experience in which he had a similar outburst of joy such as he had never known in real life.

What is interesting about this patient is that this part of his life, though small, is very cut off from the rest of his life in which he is a tough, hard-talking, independent person. He is a Libertarian with all the thinking of this philosophy. He hates all regulation. If one were to read his history in the essays about him, you could easily see why. The lesson is that all adult opinions have their origin in early infancy and childhood molded according to the traumas inflicted upon an immature psyche. Nowhere is it clearer than with this patient.

These early traumas have prevented him from living a life with stability and happiness. His choices have always been of a negative nature for his own well being. He has spent literally years getting out of the ‘red’ financially and emotionally. He said recently, “I am just learning how to listen to my dreams”. It is natural then to assume that since he is so against regulation, he would be against the messages given to him in his dreams that might regulate his life more orderly and happily.

Is there a doubt in anyone’s mind that the world is shaking with frustration, pain, rage and depression? The world at large – more than any time in its history – and all of this due to a synchrony of events that have left more people destitute than ever, and other outrages, no doubt due to mass communication which is instantaneous. Everywhere there is anxiety and danger and everywhere governments are preparing, or have prepared, to subdue the citizenry. Our hitherto free America has adopted the custom of the small dictator-led countries; anyone can be whisked away and held for detention secretly. This tells me the United States does not trust its people. It fears the inequality between the rich and the poor is so great that the tension will erupt in violence and anarchy. Syria is a model for this now, but Egypt has been as Tunisia before as well as Libya and other Mid East countries. America knows well that Americans have long fuses. It knows the people are not as sophisticated politically as Europeans or the people of the Mid or Far East. We are literally drowning in weapons of self- defense. The preparation by the government is to contain any movement to rebellion. Any leaders of such movements will get quick detention. It is especially dangerous here for we have a force of many veterans who know how to handle weapons and can engage in any kind of warfare. We have trained these soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It seems to me, taking a global and backward look to the times of Jesus, it must have been a period of such searching inquiry. Periods like that bring forth groups and sects that raise their hands to say they have the answers. We know what emerged victorious then. The church, that was later to become the Catholic church, must have been run by the most brilliant group of men in order to achieve supremacy, to wipe out descent from other groups, to consolidate and grow. I fancy that a church historian could spend years in his archives and be awe struck by the stories of the people in the events and up to the present time.

However, the facts seem to say, from dreams my patients have, that all current intellectual knowledge is useless and will fall from the shelves. Computers will also be obsolete. One patient dreams his computer no longer works. As he turns, some 8 to 12 books fell from the shelves. He was enraged at these two events and other parts of his dream; of his living in a decaying mansion which was surely falling down, the fact that he could not control any of this anymore than he could prevent the obsolescence of books of knowledge that would no longer be useful in the living to come. We remember that King Canute could not control the ocean any more than we can control the events that are to come according to this dream.

I, myself, wish to say unequivocally since I have no psychic powers, that my patients delve into their psyches and arrive with these astonishingly accurate pictures and stories. They need only to be unraveled.

I ponder my own dreams and I do not mind telling one that offered me the chance to amend my estimate of when the imprint first appears. When my patient came with this dream about the female fish with a perturbation on its underbelly, I reckoned the time to be within the first stage of embryologic development in the first four weeks. The human embryo has a resemblance to fish. At that time I had a dream of the ocean floor. A voice said, “There were three eggs on it.” Suddenly I see them but something is wrong with two of them. I see a diver appear who crushes those two eggs, which are defective. I am then looking at the one egg and as I look the realization comes to me that the imprint is already in the egg, in all the ova of the world. Fertilization is the beginning of the process, which puts into motion what is to follow. The big bang that happens to the fetus is included and occurs depending on the unconscious of the mother. This moment is not the same for every individual. When I awoke I felt that this was it, that I had had a Kekule moment.

At this time we have to consider the Mayan calendar. Why did it stop at 2012? It seems reasonable to me to assume they knew something new was coming, which they could not fathom. Again according to my patient’s dreams there will be a new age, a new way of thinking, a new way of dealing with the current problems of mankind. There will be a recognition that no one stands isolated from another, no people from his neighbor, even if that neighbor is on the opposite side of the world and has black, brown or yellow skin. How this will come about I do not know but I feel confident somebody’s dream will say how that is to be.

There is an interesting change in France. Mr. Sarkozy is thinking of a tax on the rich, a ‘Robin Hood’ tax. He feels the temper of the people. The French know. They have a history and a reply to those who say, “Let them eat cake.” Mr. Obama is being confronted with imposing a tax on Wall Street. Whatever that might be it will be miniscule in relation to what Wall Street has already stolen and can still steal. The world is in a most interesting place and appropriate to the Chinese euphemism “May you live in interesting times.” We do!

DREAM 1/2/12

I’ve taken my car, questionably a Bronco or Blazer, to a repair shop to have a new phone put in. It appears that the old one was not working. There is a Middle Eastern man who ran the shop and I was telling him what I needed. As it was the usual cell phone type, I thought that it would not take too long. However, the more I thought about it and the man looked at it, I came to realize that it would take longer than I thought. Maybe it needed a transducer, like the old pre-cell type phones for vehicles required? The man told me that it would be at least a day, or maybe two, before the parts would be available and that I would have to wait. There was something about the environment that was odd but the atmosphere was friendly and cooperative.

THOUGHTS

Blazer was my first new car. I bought it in 1978 and I had a phone installed, in that it did not come with one when new. It did require a whip antenna and a transducer, as well as a microphone for two-way communication; analysis or a new type of analysis? I did not know the man at the shop but he could have been from Egypt or Lebanon, with a definite Middle East appearance. The long wait would be understandable if a customer part was required for the installation.

DREAM 1/3/12 – This dream is after a discussion of a new way to think about psychoanalysis and what the cost would be to make a proper documentary of Dr. Bail’s work and his understanding, in an effective and impactful package, $1,000,000. DREAM I have taken my car to a machinery repair company downtown in Los Angeles, like the area I used to visit as a child. The area looked commercial and with many factories located close together. As I approach the location, a large truck moves in ahead of me to pick up some old equipment that appears to need reworking or scraping. After the truck loads it cargo, which I have to wait for, a service man comes to inquire about my visit. I don’t know what car I am driving, maybe my Infiniti, but I have three people with me. I tell him that I have come to pick up a large engine, truck or auto, and I believe that it is a straight six, or eight, and it is to possess considerable torque or power. For some reason, I think Packard, which did make powerful engines at the time they were manufactured. The man shows me the engine, which is on a pallet, and tells me that before he can transfer it to me, I will have to wait for the truck before me to leave with its load of trash. He seems nice and I wait patiently for it to be provided to me. I do not know where I am going to put it, but it’s almost as though it is to go into my Infiniti.

THOUGHTS

I have come to get something powerful, for me or for someone else. It is to be powerful and trustworthy. Clearly such an engine is available, but before I can obtain it I have to wait for something that is no longer working or serviceable to be removed. I do not know who the man is but, again, he appears to be similar to the man in the last dream. Clearly I can get it, though I don’t know exactly how but it is before my eyes in the dream.

COMMENTARY

In the second dream I call attention to the trash which as to be taken away before there can be a delivery of the powerful engine – the straight 6 or 8 possessing considerable torque.

In the first dream the subject is a new way of communication. The trash spoken about is the trash in the patient’s life, which will have to be taken away session by session in the analysis. It is really what analysis is all about. Associations also led me to think this was a metaphor for the mass unconscious. This idea has been noted before.

Why am I noting these examples? For this reason; empires have risen and fallen in these thousands of years and all were led by men who were victims of their unconscious imprints. People in the main are run by and ruined by their unconscious imprints. As these go, so goes the nations they rule. Any study of history shows all nations seem to inevitably decline. No one really knows the causes. The economists seem to think they know and put forward a logical, intellectual case. The empire is too over extended, too much debt is accumulated, too many moral lapses at the top; reasons by the bushel. All imprints lead to a natural self-destruction. Scientists may invoke the law of entropy. One thing is certain; a lack of knowledge of your imprint will ultimately destroy you. Let me be clear. I do not mean everyone will sink into poverty and despair, though many might. But there will be, in the end, an emptiness and a sense of futility about life which will make one’s life hollow and hopeless and there is only death to look forward to.

On the other hand, no one nation has ever lived according to its high self. That would require a group of men and women, enough of an electorate, to be of this quality of mind. Today only a tiny fraction of people on earth have some access to this state of mind. The likelihood is that they reside mostly in monasteries throughout the world, no matter what their religion orientation is, and there may be a few people who live on what we call, in our insufficient wisdom, the margin of society. They are the treasures that must be brought into the main stream.

Living in one’s high self, one lives according to Spirit and Spirit never guides one falsely. What never has been tried is now the only thing to try. That will require courage, perseverance and fidelity to that idea. Spirit always chooses right for you personally and collectively. For that we need a new way of “communicating” and a new powerful way of “transportation”.

Those of you who have read some or all of my essays know the way is not easy nor will it be straight ahead. There will be difficulties, side roads, pitfalls, and mistakes while we work through our false human information. There will be resistance and one must keep in mind we have one infallible star to keep us on track - the dream, which is the high self’s way of lighting the path.

January 2012