| "What could it be, to lead a dream-centered life?" Aizenstat, 2006;This introduction by Pacifica Graduate Institute founding president and architect of DreamTending, Stephen Aizenstat, summarized my midlife angst and posed the defining question of my late adulthood vocation. Set against the backdrop of a frenetically extraverted 21st-Century Western culture that rewards the linear, external realm of Logos at the expense of Eros, even to ask this question is to advocate on behalf of a vital, severely endangered species: dream. This thesis is in response to that call, which echoed the charge I had received a few years prior in the dramatic, first dream-time appearance of a fierce feminine guide, White-Owl Woman. Explored hermeneutically are three expressions of the unconscious psyche, the soul as mapped by Carl Jung: the images in dream, the numinous felt-experience of inner and outer worlds aligned through synchronicity, and the symbolic language of body symptom. The focus is a decade-long transformation that involved first a grounding in the sacred space of home; then, inexorable promptings of vocation; and finally, culmination in a depth, a dream-centered, response to the challenge of serious illness, in this case cancer. The role of the depth psychotherapist is a crucial context throughout. |
