hillman lecture at cia: dreaming or lobbying?

yesterday i went to hear dr. james hillman speak at CIA. he is a psychologist, and was one of the last directors of the C.G. Jung center in zurich while jung was alive. i have heared dr. hillman lecture in the past and found him lively and interesting. he spoke on dreams, adressing many of the different purposes of dreams,from anxiety to predictive. this time i was under the impression, from the advertisments and the blurb written in Scene, that he was going to talk about how people are born knowing their purpose, and dreams are messages that will lead us to our futures. the specific imagery had been the idea of the oak tree looking into it's own acorn.

unfortunatly, i left disappointed. first, the sound quality was not great. it had a fuzziness that seemed to make the words incomplete. then, to my suprise, he ended up talking about religion and polotics and imagination. some of it was interesting. the verb "to dream", says hillman, never appears in the new testaments and the word "dream" is used only three times. being an old testeament jewish girl, i was shocked. someone is constantly dreaming, joseph and his predictive dreams etc. in the first five books of the bible. a phrase he used often was "the causaisin (spelled as he pronounces it), christian way". he discussed the lack of imagination in government, often referring to "the cheney, wolfawitz, rumsfeld, rice" making this team one entity. his two main political points were that the war in iraq and the horrible environmental policies we have show a lack of imagination from "the cheneyl, wolfawitz, rumsfeld, rice". personally, i think they have been very imaginative in their use of government for increasing their own personal wealth and stature, infact it has been phenomenal what a good job they have done at creating a country in which their imagination has become everyone's reality and only their best friends truly come out on top. hillman seemed to equate imagination as something that only existed if it agreed with what he sees as the right thing to do (like pull out of iraq or create environmentally friendly policies), and that the thought that went into existing policy was unimaginative because "they didnt think about the importance of, say art, in the places they were bombing". no, they were imaging about themselves, and their own beliefs, but it is still imagining. what started as a dream lecture became a bit of a democratic rally.

then i got tripped up by the semantics of the lecture. "don't interpret, be interested" in the dream. well, what is being interested? "asking questions of the dream, for you dont have the dream, the dream has you" well, no wonder my therapist gets annoyed with me when i come in having had a dream conversation with myself, positive i understand the meaning. no wonder she always tries to take me anywhere then my own interpretation- and i dont think i agree with it. hillman refered to people's lack of knowledge as innocence, i would call it ignorance (it's the difference between not being able to really understand and not being educated in my mind)

and really, while i appreciate Dr. hillman's view on the world, and even mostly agree with him, i felt tricked into this lecture, persuaded by dreams.

and he never once mentioned the acorn.