Dream weaver
Wednesday, August 1st, 2007Dr. Michael Lennox is an affable intellectual that approaches life with an absorbed, and absorbing, intensity. For Michael Lennox it is always about consciousness and the journey of discovery. He is both kind and sharing and doesn’t bullshit you. He was on the air with me today from Los Angeles.
What does he do? He is a dream analyst. Sound weird to you? Think again.
Most people approach life with a low level of self examination. Only during apparent crisis do most people stop and question how they think, why they feel the way they do, and how they talk to themselves. You see, there is always something locked away that hurts us or drives us crazy. Yes there are those of us who are more emotionally dead and just don’t feel much, sometimes that is a defense, and sometimes it is just a plain lack of emotional range. But most people want to know, how do I really feel about this or that? Of what am I really afraid?
Northrop Frye, the great Canuck who developed the genre of literary criticism with his ground breaking academic work, The Anatomy of Criticism, was a great thinker. Frye viewed the world through broad based conceptual patterns that encompassed archetypes and codes: cultural and spiritual and imaginative shorthand from The Bible to William Blake. That is what archetypes and symbols are: a distillation of a thing or an idea in shorthand; but archetypes and codes just don’t represent things, they imbue them with more meaning, like the shorthand of poetry; an archetype is also an inherited idea that lies within the unconscious self.
Psychologist Carl Jung believed that we are all related in a collective unconscious. We all dream the same things in the same way: the sensation of falling for example. As a human species, we are all related in terms of our thoughts and experiences and the way we emotionally respond and process them.
As a dream analyst, Michael Lennox knows this. He also has great intuition. He is one of those givers who can drill down to talk to you about intimate stuff with understanding and a lack of condemnation, not a lack of judgment. We can judge, just not condemn.
The phone lines were flooded and he took each call and analyzed the things/event/symbols in the dreams and let each of them know what was going on in their head. The callers responded with openness and a sense of wonder at the simplicity of our complexities and the overarching fear of loveless ness and goal of love.
Dr. Lennox causes me to believe that there is magic of some kind; unknown forces; something sublime; the soul.